NETCOM Research Group

Arturo Azcorra spreads the 5TONIC message

Promotes potential of 5G to international audiences

Arturo Azcorra, the vice-president of the 5TONIC Research and Innovation Laboratory in Madrid, has been spreading the word internationally about the benefits and opportunities created by 5G mobile networks.

Last week, Arturo – who is a professor at University Carlos III of Madrid and is also a director of IMDEA Networks, the research institute which co-founded and hosts the 5TONIC lab - took part in a Next Generation Internet (NGI) conference to promote the opportunity for companies to co-create smart 5G connectivity solutions within the 5TONIC laboratory.

Arturo was speaking at the Fed4FIRE+ Engineering Conference (FEC3) in Paris. Fed4Fire+ brings together researchers, developers, industry, SMEs, innovative experimenters, testbed and technology providers to collaborate on large-scale NGI experimentation efforts on technologies ranging from wireless to wired networks, cloud services, and software defined networks (SDN).

At the event, Arturo took part in a panel on NFV/SDN Testbeds and Experiments and explained that 5TONIC is Europe’s first open co-creation testbed in 5G technologies.  Within the laboratory 5TONIC’s members – internationally renowned tech companies, universities and research institutions - are able to test, demo, trial and prototype advanced wireless network systems on the basis of open and flexible research collaboration.

“The promise of 5G networks is to give us access to almost unlimited communications, data and computational services in real time,” he said. “5G poses an enormous technological challenge as its impact will be felt across the board, well beyond the ICT sector. It is therefore necessary to work together on multiple spheres and in new directions.

“At 5TONIC we believe collaboration is key to solve problems that are more complex than any one team or organization can handle,” he explained. “Our member companies are coming together to search for non-proprietary solutions to challenges as varied as autonomous vehicle communications, network virtualization, future Internet architectures, software-defined networks, the Internet-of-Things, communication in millimeter wave frequencies or augmented reality.”

As a result of its participation at Fed4FIRE+, 5TONIC hopes to attract potential interest from other NGI hubs targeting a specific focus on collaboration projects covering Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Radio (SDR), which are key enablers of 5G technologies.

In fact, last week 5TONIC also announced that it will be involved in the first NFV and SDN Masters’ degree in the world for 5G networks, organized by Ericsson and Universidad Carlos III of Madrid.

Paris was simply the latest stop of Arturo’s speaking tour of international conferences. In February he took part in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and then at the beginning of March he addressed the 5th Workshop on Society and the Digital Economy in Madrid.

Organized by the Spanish Ministry of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda, the workshop brought together a panel of technical and academic experts to discuss the social implications of future technologies.  Arturo was able to position the fifth generation of wireless data networks as one of the most important technology developments of this century and to highlight the work to help realise the potential of 5G mobile networks that 5TONIC is pioneering in its laboratories.