Smart Cities have attracted attention as one of the possible solutions to improve “livability” and people’s quality of life. In this context, beyond 5G and 6G are candidate technologies to positively impact aspects of immense social value as sustainability, resilience, inclusion, trust, security, etc. Starting from such basis, TrialsNet vision is to enable the realization of compelling societal values through the implementation of 5G and beyond applications, which are propaedeutic for the transition towards the next generation of mobile network. Based on a set of well-defined objectives covering technical, performance, productivity aspects, TrialsNet aims at deploying full large-scale trials to implement a heterogenous and comprehensive set of innovative 6G applications based on various technologies such as Cobots, metaverse, massive twinning, Internet of Senses, and others, covering three relevant domains of the urban ecosystems in Europe identified as (i) Infrastructure, Transportation, Security & Safety, (ii) eHealth & Emergency, and (iii) Culture, Tourism & Entertainment.
In the context of these three domains, TrialsNet designs and implements 13 use cases (Figure 1) developed over wide coverage areas and involving real users in the 4 geographical clusters of Italy, Spain, Greece and Romania. The use cases are transversal, as different implementations of the same use case are developed in more than one cluster; this approach allows for a holistic evaluation of the KPIs and KVIs of the use cases in different contexts and scenarios (e.g. commercial, private, or experimental, including advanced functionalities), as well as various sets of users.
Through its extensive trials activity, TrialsNet collected a relevant amount of data in terms of network performances (KPIs) as well as feedback from real users (KVIs); the results were analyzed and evaluated, with both quantitative and qualitative tasks, to capture the user value perception of the applications, to find product/market fits, to identify what is critical to consider in terms of requirements and functionalities for the products and services of the next generation.
