The IMAGINE-B5G project aims to build an advanced, easily accessible, secure, and programmable E2E B5G platform (Project Objective (PO) 2) to fill the gap between the B5G market expectation and the capabilities of existing 5G-PPP infrastructure projects. The platform is composed of four advanced 5G experimental facilities, located in Norway, Spain, France, and Portugal. It serves the use cases of industrial verticals in PPDR, media, education, agriculture & forestry, eHealth, transportation & logistics, and Industry 4.0. With well-defined APIs (PO3), these use cases can onboard their applications and validate their specific KPIs. The outcomes will help both IMAGINE-B5G and the society to gain a better understanding of how the B5G solutions will impact the society and what impacts are created (PO8), which will enable the society to optimize the strategy and roadmap of adopting B5G into the business and society and even KVIs (PO1 & 7).
Although all the facilities are capable of providing 5G and even B5G services, they use different technology solutions and thus have different ways of building, deploying, managing, and operating their 5G networks, e.g. near-commercial solutions for large-scale trials (PO6) and open-source solutions for trials of advanced features (PO4 & 6). This creates the flexibility and agility to support different types of experimenters, such as academic and research-oriented and industrial and development-oriented.
To support the ever-growing demands from these vertical use cases, the IMAGINE-B5G platform is continuously evolving, associated with three platform releases, each of which will be accompanied by the addition of a set of advanced 5G features. The introduction of new advanced 5G features and their integration with the platform (or individual facility) can be facilitated by three open-calls (OC), whose procedures are aligned with the three platform releases. The other target of open calls is to co-create more innovative vertical use cases with external partners, to complement the use cases created by the consortium partners. In this way, more external partners are attracted to either enhance the platform or onboard/test more vertical use cases (PO5).
Depending on the type of the OC projects, the IMAGINE-B5G project supports OC projects in two ways: i) integrate and validate the technologies that extend the platform (PO 7); or ii) onboard and then validate the vertical use cases based on the proposed KPIs and KVIs (POs1, 2 & 5).