Nokia launches 5G MoNArch research project with €7.7 mn budget

Swisscom and 5GNokia has launched the 5G MoNArch (5G Mobile Network Architecture) research project with a €7.7 million budget in two years.

Phase II of 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) – as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program – is financing 5G MoNArch.

The goal of 5G MoNArch is to use network slicing, which capitalizes on the capabilities of software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), orchestration, and analytics, to support use cases in vertical industries such as automotive, healthcare, and media.

Objectives of 5G MoNArch

# Detailed specification and extension of 5G architecture

# Enhancement of architectural designs with enabling innovations such as inter-slice control and cross-domain management, experiment-driven modeling and optimization, and cloud-enabled protocol stack

# Functional innovations around the key technologies required for dedicated 5G use cases: resilience, security, and resource elasticity

# Deployment and experimental implementation of the architecture for two use cases in real-world testbeds – heavy communications usage in a tourist-heavy city, and secure communication in seaport environment

# Evaluation, validation, and verification of the architecture performance

The project consortium, consisting of 14 industrial and academic partners and coordinated by Nokia, will focus on the implementation of 5G use cases in real-world testbeds. 5G MoNArch will put fifth-generation mobile network architecture into practice.

5G MoNArch involves 14 mobile network players from six European countries.

5G-MoNArch enriches the original architectural concepts of the first phase with innovations such as cloud-enabled network protocols, and showcases the new technology in two testbeds. The flexible and programmable architecture will support services, use cases, and applications that 5G will bring in the next years.

“5G PPP brings together a range of stakeholders from the communications technology sector and other industries. We follow a shared architecture of what the next-generation communications infrastructure needs to look like to enable and meet the network demands of the next decade,” said Peter Merz, head of End-to-End Mobile Networks Solutions at Nokia Bell Labs.