A platform that enables SMEs and developers to acquire knowledge with regard to the latest 5G applications and approaches for first responders and crisis management, as well as building up and experimenting with their solutions. The engaged SMEs and organizations that participate in the realization of the use cases already constitute active players in the public security and disaster management.
5G-EPICENTRE aims to create an open-standards, end-to-end (E2E) 5G experimentation platform with the purpose of facilitating the evaluation of ground-breaking ICT technologies in the domain of Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR). This platform is expected to provide SMEs and developers the opportunity to gain insight into the latest 5G network applications (NetApps) and functions for servicing the needs of first responders and crisis management, as well as to develop and experiment with their own applications. For the establishment of the platform, an open Service-Oriented Architecture (SoA) will be implemented and security by design approaches will be incorporated. The platform will also act as a 5G open source repository for 5G-enabled PPDR solutions by accommodating and providing access to a federation of evolutionary 5G networks’ resources.
A considerable number of first-party experiments will be carried out with the aim of expanding the 3 ITU-defined service types (i.e. eMBB, mMTC and URLLC) and evaluating the platform’s secure interoperability capabilities beyond vendor-specific implementation. For this reason, well-established SMEs and organizations operating in the public security and disaster management market will participate in the definition of use cases, thus contributing significantly to the assessment of 5G-EPICENTRE by identifying the real needs that should be addressed. Through the realization of these first-party experiments, KPIs relevant to 5G will be used to measure the performance of the platform, especially KPIs related to services’ creation time.