Hyper 5G

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Impacts :

Impact 1: Enhanced EU – US cooperation in Next Generation Internet, including policy cooperation.

The project will enable US researchers to collaborate with multidisciplinary EU teams experienced in diverse large-scale platforms, including Grid5000 and IoT-Lab. Likewise, the EU team will perform experiments on US testbeds, such as NSF PAWR program-sponsored testbeds, and bring its competence in digital twins (DT) to help US partners build DT Hub capabilities to control and manage IoT. Simultaneously, the US team will provide expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning that will empower the DH Hubs and provide expertise to the EU team to conduct experiments on US testbeds. This is a win-win partnership in which both partners mutually benefit from their respective expertise, nurture their existing relationship, and forge a strong alliance that promises to drive further future collaboration. Furthermore, the US and EU will experiment with diverse protocols in terms of capabilities (e.g., LPWAN, Optical/cellular and mobile, SDR, O-RAN). We will also explore other testbeds, such as the US-based NSF Chameleon Cloud and CHI@Edge, building upon new functionalities for managed distributed federated learning, edge computing, cybersecurity, zero trust, big data analytics, and data visualization. Both partners will benefit from the complementary know-how and the volume of knowledge that they will share to realize such cross-Atlantic experimental setups.
The project offers an invaluable and truly unique opportunity for developing collaborative EU-US experimentally driven research on resilient NGI services on trans-Atlantic testbeds. This is a unique opportunity for the EU partners to experiment with their prototype on one of the largest and most advanced wireless testbeds, ensuring interoperability between US and EU platforms. Furthermore, the Hyper-5G project will reinforce cooperation for better future EU-US relations. Their active collaboration has already created a fruitful relationship in developing the future standard for IEEE P1930.1, called SDN-MCM—SDN-based Middleware for Control and Management of 5G multi-RAT Networks.

Impact 2: Reinforced collaboration and increased synergies between the Next Generation Internet and Tomorrow's Internet programmes.

The project brings together Dr. Hakiri and Dr. Ben Yahia from the EU and Prof. Gokhale and Aniruddha S  from the United States. Dr. Hakiri has developed strong expertise in distributed networks, SDN/NFV, and IoT communication and has worked on several R&I projects, including H2020 SmartNet, IPERCITIES, and ANR projects such as ADN, SATCOM, SMART4ALL, SAFEST, and FORESIGHT. Prof. Ben Yahia leads the Data Science Group at Taltech and has worked on diverse research topics, including big data analytics, data mining and visualization, information extraction, and ontology. He also led a team that developed robot-human collaboration and the Internet of Things in industrial processes. At Vanderbilt, Prof. Gokhale has worked on over 25 NSF and DoD-DARPA projects, including the NSF  Convergence Accelerator, the NSF Smart and Connected Communities Pilot Project, the AFOSR Dynamic Data-Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS) program, the NSF US Ignite program, the NSF CAREER and many more. Prof. Gokhale is interested in solving systems problems involving a variety of quality of service and data consistency issues through effective resource management, particularly in cloud computing, Cyber-Physical systems, and the Internet of Things.

Furthermore, EU-US teams have recently submitted a joint research project in the NSF Convergence Accelerator program for realizing secure end-to-end flows in 5G networks. They had also previously submitted a proposal titled "RINGS: Resilience using Distributed Digital Twins." The EU-US partners have participated in and chaired numerous international conference venues and edited top-rated international journals. Therefore, this project will reach numerous well-established communities and an extensive social network from industry and academia, spanning North America, the EU, and Asia. The project reinforces the chances of collaboration and increases synergies between Next-Generation and Tomorrow's Internet programmes.

Impact 3: Developing interoperable solutions and joint demonstrators, contributions to standards.

The project’s main idea is to develop an interoperable network of digital twins in which DT hubs from the EU and US can exchange data across unified, large-scale, distributed wireless edge-cloud testbeds spanning two continents, which will offer a unique opportunity to develop interoperable solutions and joint demonstrations. Different heterogeneous technologies and protocols in terms of capabilities (e.g., LPWAN, SDN/OpenFlow, 5G-NR, MQTT, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) that fit different standards (e.g., IEEE, 3GPP, ONF, etc.) are expected to interoperate and contribute toward standardization efforts on digital twins, i.e., by defining scope and terms, working on concepts and vocabulary, on use cases, policies, life-cycle issues, virtual systems, devices, and sensors, to include digital twins on a reference architecture. This NGI Atlantic Hyper-5G project will identify possible partnerships and joint activities within other standardization bodies and working groups within ISO and IEC. Our previous collaboration has also contributed to developing the IEEE P1930.1 standard. We expect this NGI project to create a working group to create and write a new standard on digital twin architecture for 5G and beyond (B5G).

Impact 4: An EU - US ecosystem of top researchers, hi-tech start-ups / SMEs, and Internet-related communities collaborating on the evolution of the Internet

he PIs of the project already has a combined academic and professional network, including many  start-ups and SMEs. For example, Prof. Ben Yahia and Dr. Hakiri actively participate in joining academia-industry European research projects. Prof. Ben Yahia has also contributed to several joint projects with start-ups in France, Germany, and Estonia, many government agencies in Tunisia, and NGOs in Europe. Prof. Gokhale and Dr. Hakiri have been the Ph.D. advisers of Dr. Prithviraj Patil, who is leading a team at MathWorks, Boston, USA, specializing in AI and DevOps for cloud and IoT. They also collaborate with Radisys, an industrial partner specializing in containerized 5G software stacks, on "NSF Convergence Accelerator 2022: Joint NSF/DOD Phases 1 and 2 for Track G: Securely Operating Through 5G Infrastructure." Prof. Gokhale has an ongoing industrial partnership with Siemens on 5G networking for factory automation systems and preliminary discussions with RadiSys, an industrial partner specializing in a containerized 5G software stack. Prof. Gokhale also participated at Vanderbilt in numerous mentoring graduate, undergraduate, and high school students over the years. The EU and US partners actively contribute to the EU-US research project with Siemens Technology, USA, specializing in AI for automation and drive technology. In addition, they are contributing to Public-Private Partnership programmes such as NSF Convergence Accelerator 2022 and Joint NSF/DOD "Track G: Securely Operating Through 5G Infrastructure.

 

Results :

The expected results of the project will be the successful validation of some key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs are listed below:

1. KPI1 : Research Impact  and publication on the thematic of the projects. Target: submitted publications ≥ 2
2. KPI2 Transferable skills gained by EU-US teams. Target:  2 master students and 2 Ph.D. students participating in the project gain analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills;
3. KPI3 Network performance  evaluated on remote testbeds. Target: The effectiveness of the network performance should provide:
   1. Latency ≤ 150ms,
   2. Bandwidth between 80% and 100% of the link
   3. The impact of mobility on data quality
       between 95% and 100% or velocity speed of
      10 m/s – 35 m/s,
   4. Data loss rate for IoT nodes less than 10-6.
   5. Request/response rates ≥ 57%
4. KPI4 Network DT implementation on both EU-US sites. Target: Network DT large-scale testbed implemented ≥ 1
5. KPI5 Tutorial on DT for 5G network,describing the best practices implemented in the EU and the US. Target:  Number of Tutorial on the thematic of 5G-enabled Network Digital Twin for distributed IoT network ≥1
6. KPI6 Workshop to promote inclusive collaborations. Target: Collaborative workshops organized ≥2
7. KPI7 Cloud platforms tested. Target: Cloud platforms tested ≥2

Future Plan :

The HyPer-5G project proposes to experiment with and evaluate a prototype of a Digital Twin (DT) network or achieving resilient 5G internet services, and interconnecting two geographically distributed edge-cloud infrastructures, i.e., Grid5000 and Fit IoT-Lab in Europe and Chameleon Cloud and CHI-Edge in the US, to assess the feasibility of deploying new 5G services using the twin. We have surveyed a wide range of recent and state-of-the-art projects, software implementations, and standardization efforts in the realm of the digital twin. We discovered that most researchers believe that current digital architectures require additional research efforts to provide a unified framework that can ensure interoperability between different industrial applications, allow diverse domains that can benefit from DT, and ensure secure data dissemination at scale among potentially distributed industrial IoT systems.

We have identified Eclipse Ditto, an open-source framework for creating, managing, and controlling digital twins, as the DT service that represents the devices and their properties (e.g., temperature and humidity). Ditto fits all the criteria for building distributed DT hubs. We have implemented an API that allows our framework to distribute data across trans-Atlantic cloud servers we have provisioned in both cloud platforms, i.e., Grid5000 in France (Europe) and Chameleon Cloud in Texas (USA). Besides, we introduced Device as a Service by offering a high-level abstract API (realized as a REST API) to accessremote devices, a state management service for event notification of state changes in the DT, and digital twin management by offering a meta-data scheme for searching and selecting digital twins. We have evaluated the proposed solution in the cross-Atlantic testbeds and shown the effectiveness of the proposed solution in achieving low latency and guaranteeing end-to-end QoS parameters on different platforms.

We have realized that the end-to-end QoS parameters can be generally respected, such as a maximum delay of 130 ms, below the threshold of 150 ms. Additionally, since both the EU Grid5000 and the US Chameleon Cloud platforms support high-speed optical fiber at 10 Gb/s, the end-to-end bandwidth is also guaranteed during all the experiments. We find that scenario 2 in our experiments has more significant latency; we can explain this variation by the time required to create, establish, maintain, and release the resources at the endpoints of each router on different platforms.

We have not studied an exhaustive list of opportunities in the Hyper-5G project. Although several opportunities for DT exist, they also pose a set of challenges that should be addressed, which will require coordinated attention from the research community for its success and wide acceptance.

NGI related Topic :

Experimental Platform interconnections

Call Reference :

5