Demos, Hackathons, Dissemination, and Cooperation in Paris

Metro-Haul just held its fourth plenary (month 16), hosted by Nokia in Paris-Saclay. It was a busy meeting focusing on discussions and plans, not just status and reporting.

Didier Bourse, 5G-PPP Technical Board Chair at MH Plenary

Didier Bourse from Nokia Incubator dropped in to address the meeting. Didier chairs the Technical Board of the EC’s 5G-PPP and has the unenviable task of trying to coordinate the activities of more than 80 concurrent projects that leverage or support 5G. As he says, he is trying to move the work from “project level” to “programme level”, and he is doing this by dividing the work into 8 broad categories and letting the projects. The projects then register their activities in these categories making it much easier to search for collaborative possibilities.

Metro-Haul is a bit of an oddity as its focus is the support environment for 5G: most other projects are examining 5G technology or applications. But, as Didier pointed out, this could actually be an advantage for us as we can provide tutorials and help across the whole 5G-PPP set of projects. In particular, Metro Haul should be looking to participate in two activities:

1. Multi-project workshops. Metro-Haul should find projects that have use cases that mirror or supplement ours, and work with them to develop a better understanding of the requirements on, and capabilities of, the 5G transport network. Additionally, we might seek to build one or more multi-project demos.

2. White papers. We already had as one of our WP6 stretch goals the production of a few “definitive” white papers that we could host on the Metro-Haul web site to be downloadable for free and (hopefully) to be a valuable resource for the industry. Didier has a similar goal for 5G-PPP and there is a synergy between these two objectives such that we might produce some papers that would become 5G-PPP resources.

WP5 is responsible for “Validation and Demonstration including Vertical Industries” and is currently working on Deliverable D5.2, a demo of the control plane aspects of the Metro-Haul project. To support this, the WP is planning a series of hackathons to work on OpenSource and project-specific code. The first of these is likely to be done with remote participation, but later gatherings may be physical and invite participants from other projects.

A lot of the meeting time was spent trying to plan integrated tests and demonstrations. There are a great number of challenges putting together credible scenarios pulling in hardware from multiple partners and devising ways to deploy a range of software control systems. And all of this has to be done in consideration of the project’s key use cases. In this process there was a remarkable amount of discussion, hand-waving, slides, and white-boarding. This demonstrated the true value of a plenary meeting not just for communicating status, but for high-bandwidth discussions and exchange of ideas between all 21 partners.

A great crowd of talented people: the Metro-Haul team at Nokia