“Exceptionally Successful” Metro-Haul Project in Support of 5G Services

“Exceptionally Successful” Metro-Haul Project Plans Final Deliverables and Showcase Demonstrations to Illustrate the Value of SDN Control of Flexible Metro Networks in Support of 5G Services

Pisa Meeting of EU-Funded Project Hosted by Ericsson Telecomunicazioni and CNIT

Pisa, Italy, 31 October 2019 – 28 months into its 3-year run, representatives of the 21 partner organisations met in Pisa to plan the final stages of the Metro-Haul project. Pisa is the home of two of the consortium members (Ericsson Telecomunicazioni and Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario Per Le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT)), and they kindly hosted the meeting.

Metro-Haul is a Horizon 2020 European Union research and innovation programme that is working to design and build a smart optical metro infrastructure able to support traffic originating from heterogeneous 5G access networks, addressing the anticipated capacity increase and its specific characteristics, e.g., mobility, low latency, low jitter etc. This infrastructure will also support a wide variety of services and use cases with special emphasis on services from various industries vertical to the ICT.

The project has just had its second-year project review where the work so far was assessed as outstanding, with exceptional success being recorded through its massive impact in dissemination and standardisation. In just over two years, the project has generated over 170 papers published in journals and conference proceedings. The papers and the project blog can be found on its web site at https://www.metro-haul.eu/.

“The new 5G networking technology will facilitate a wide range of new services that will radically change the way users experience the Internet,” said Antonio D’Errico, senior researcher at Ericsson Telecomunicazioni. “It will facilitate the interconnection of smart devices including in autonomous vehicles, and it will facilitate collaborative applications between users as they move around their lives.”

“Ericsson is delighted to be part of the Metro-Haul project,” he continued. “We are experts in many of the technologies necessary to build an end-to-end 5G network, and it is essential that we play an active part in leading-edge research into how these networks can be constructed and deployed.”

“CNIT is is a non-profit consortium, established in 1995, bringing together 37 public Italian universities to perform research, innovation and education/training activities in the field of the Information and Communication Technology,” said Filippo Cugini, CNIT’s lead on Metro-Haul. “One of our five National Laboratories is located in Pisa where we specialize in Photonic Networks & Technologies.”

“CNIT is a leading developer of advanced optical equipment, and we are pleased that our ROADMs and switching matrices are being used as core components of the Metro-Haul demonstration scenarios,” Filippo explained. “These demonstrations are key to establishing the value of Metro-Haul and to proving that the wide range of technologies produced by the partners can be integrated into real networks to provide real services.”

This plenary has been very important for the project because it has brought more than 40 people together from across Europe to finalise the details of the demonstrations. The scenarios that will be demonstrated are complex and the discussions this week have been very intense, but a lot of important progress been made and we are confident that we will be able to show valid operational networks before the end of the project in summer 2020.

About Metro-Haul

Launched in mid-2017, the Metro-Haul Project receives funding (G.A. 761727) from the Horizon 2020 EU research and innovation program. The aim of the €7.7 million project is to design and build a smart optical metro infrastructure able to support traffic originating from heterogeneous 5G access networks, addressing the anticipated capacity increase and its specific characteristics, including mobility, low latency, and low jitter. This infrastructure will also support a wide variety of services and use cases with special emphasis on services from various industries vertical to the ICT.

Website: https://metro-haul.eu
Twitter: @MetroHaul
Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13543287
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Metro-Haul