5G-TOURS showed the potential of 5G by demonstrating its ability to support multiple verticals revolving around the life in a city. It has focused on improving the citizens’ quality of life as well as the experience of the tourists visiting the city, ultimately making the city more attractive to visit, more efficient in terms of mobility, and safer for everybody. To achieve this vision, the use cases addressed by 5G-TOURS followed three main themes (see Figure 1):
- The touristic city: The visitors of museums and outdoor attractions are provided with 5G-based applications to enhance their experience while visiting the city. This includes: VR/AR applications to complement the physical visit with additional content, robot-assisted services, telepresence to allow for remote visits, and 5G-enabled live events such as concerts.
- The safe city: 5G technology greatly improves the safety in the city by providing means to better assist health-related care in all the phases of an incident, ranging from the health monitoring and early detection, intervention at the ambulance and finally surgery at the wireless operation room in the hospital.
- The mobility-efficient city: Mobility is made more efficient and comfortable, improving navigation systems as well as parking, making traveling more enjoyable with AR/VR services, and improving the efficiency of airports logistics by relying on 5G for their operation.
In order to deploy its use cases, 5G-TOURS developed a comprehensive 5G architecture that incorporates (i) the enabling technologies of the 5G-EVE ICT-17 platform, (ii) fundamental enablers such as broadcast and enhanced orchestration technologies, (iii) novel machine learning functionalities; and (iv) a novel service layer that provides verticals with an interface to automate their service requests. On top of these network-layer innovations, 5G-TOURS also developed a set of vertical solutions and applications enabled by 5G technology that are needed for the envisioned use cases, encompassing: media distribution applications, media production solutions, a connected robot, e-health-related products and mobility platforms. The 5G-TOURS modules are illustrated in Figure 2.
The 5G-TOURS technology was finally validate in large experimental facilities deployed into real world environment such as airports and museum during their opening days, to support the conclusions drawn by the project with hands-on experience.
That is, the conclusions of the project were derived after the 13 use cases were implemented, trialed and validated. The project results showed that the use cases have a high impact for the three types of verticals on the citizens’ quality of experience: users adopted the use cases and appreciated the project innovations. The network innovations were validated against the adopted network architecture, showing its capability to support the required QoS.
