The TRIANGLE project held its first set of Open Calls towards the end of 2016. These Open Calls or funding round, were aimed at 5G operators, device manufacturers and applications developers wishing to test and benchmark on a readymade 5G testbed as well as those companies and institutions who might wish to extend the testbed with their own set of capabilities. Resulting from this, there were a number of applications from a diverse set of countries across the EU and an interesting mix of sectors.
The successful applicants had proposals in the areas of medical home care using connected devices, augmented reality tourist applications and streaming media. The extension selected will bring lots more capacity to the testbed for testing media streaming Use Cases. A noteworthy observation on the applications was that, Greece in particular, seems to be a popular 5G hotspot of innovation! It has been very exciting to see what a number of small businesses are planning to develop with a 5G testbed. As expected the potential use cases are aligned with the 5G Use Cases identified in the NGMN whitepaper, and cover both mobile applications and hardware devices.
To outline some of the other areas of 5G Innovation, some of the non-successful applicants were proposing drone control, artificial intelligence for video stream analysis and many other fascinating areas. The project hopes to continue to receive a diverse set of proposals in the future Open Calls.
The selection of the successful applicants was assisted by a group of international experts to assist in the selection process. This proved quite challenging, mainly due to the quality of the applications and the diversity of the application areas.
Some of the Use Cases required by the successful applicants are already leading to improvements in the versatility of the testbed. Some of the additions that the team will be working on to enable these Use Cases include changes to the testbed to support the following:
- Geolocation emulation
- Virtual reality emulation
- A robotic arm to move devices through different angles
The successful applicants will spend the coming months planning and executing their experiments using various features and configurations of the Testbed while other applicants will improve the current capabilities of the Testbed by adding their extension. The team are keen to learn from this first batch of testbed users, and to incorporate their feedback for use in future testbed iterations and additionality functionality.
Meeting the diverse needs of the KPIs that are important for both testing and Benchmarking mobile applications as well as for various types of IoT devices has been a challenging task for the TRIANGLE team. The team have been hard at work to define those KPIs, and developing the means to accurately measure them.
In the meantime, the team are already preparing for the next open calls for experiments and extensions, which will open in Q2 this year. This call will also be open to other FIRE projects, so the team are excited about the possibility of working with other testbeds and research groups to improve the testbed capabilities. Key areas of interest are improving capabilities in testing IoT devices and also in edge side processing, and many other areas.
The Triangle team are keen to hear from anyone interested in working with us, either through the Open Call process, or via other partnership possibilities. Please reach out to us at info@triangle-project.eu or meet one of the team or check out our demonstrations at various upcoming industry events.