Horizon 2020: Italtel participates in innovative small cells project “SESAME” supported by the European Commission
Project will look at how small cells can be virtualized to enable 5G services.
Italtel, a leading company in next generation networks and services and IP communication, today announced it will receive approximately €500,000, after a consortium it is a member of was chosen to promote the research project “Small-cell Coordination for Multi-tenancy and Edge services” (SESAME), GA No.671596, which will be supported by the European Commission’s Research and Development (R&D) funds.
SESAME is part of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action and comes under the topic of “Advanced 5G Network Infrastructure for the Future Internet”.
Italtel’s R&D team contributed to the innovative SESAME ideas, which include applying the concept of Edge Cloud to small cells with the aim of establishing 5G services. This will be achieved by transforming the physical resources (small cells) of specific telecom operators into virtualized resources and developing an innovative architecture capable of making a specific area of small cell coverage available to different operators in an “as a service” manner through a neutral platform. This can be achieved by intelligently exploiting the Edge Cloud and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigms.
SESAME will run for 30 months, ending in December 2017, and involve 18 partners – including network operators, IT service providers, manufacturers and SMEs, research institutes and academic partners – from eight different countries. The project was chosen by the European Commission as a result of its investment into 5G systems R&D, through the 5G Public Private Partnership (5G PPP) program which the Commission initiated.
Italtel’s CEO Stefano Pileri said: “I am proud of this award and of the role Italtel has played in designing this project. By funding SESAME, the European Commission has placed its trust in all members of the SESAME consortium and we will not let it down. The current focus on 5G gives a clear insight into the future and through close collaboration and teamwork, each partner will achieve optimal results and professional enrichment. I am proud to lead a company that over the years has been able to reinvent itself and become a leader in innovation.”
With this project, Italtel, together with its partners, aims to leverage the logic of Edge Cloud, through the use of low power CPUs and hardware accelerators, to supply service providers with computing resources which offer qualities including low cost, low power consumption – in line with European directives – and low space consumption.
This approach will allow the concept of Light Data Center (Light DC) to be applied more easily and less invasively, providing a better user experience. Compared to a conventional DC, a Light DC allows systems to be optimized according to required applications through increased scalability, while still reducing waste.
Italtel has also proposed the development of a ‘use case’ in which the proximity of the Light DC helps to significantly reduce latency levels for real-time communication and increase the efficiency of video transcoding. This activity involves the use of Italtel products, including its Session Border Controller (NetMatch-S), which transparently uses the virtualized resources of Light DC and Embrace, a WebRTC video communication platform.
For more information about the SESAME project, see the dedicated website.
