About

The research project Adaptive Management of 5G Services to Support Critical Events in Cities (5GCity) is a granted project of the Spanish's Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through the National Programme for Fostering Excellence in Scientific and Technical Research, Sub-Programme "Proyectos de I+D orientados a Retos de la Sociedad". This is a collaborative project coordinated by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), and developed in collaboration with the i2CAT Foundation (i2CAT), the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the Universidad de Granada (UGR) and the Universidad del Pais Vasco Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU).

The penetration of Internet in diverse aspects of human activity is accelerating the demand for the creation of communication environments with more capabilities. These new environments are characterized by the interconnection of heterogeneous systems, the ability to handle an increasing disparity of Quality of Service levels, the diversity of data -and the associated information and knowledge- that is transmitted, processed and stored, the instantaneousness of many requested services and the delocalized nature of communications.

Given this scenario, the 5G R&D initiative has been proposed under the umbrella of the Horizon 2020 programme, driven fundamentally by the European Commission and its member countries. One of the most important challenges of 5G is the provisioning of telecommunication services in dense urban areas, mainly due to the expected demand growth in the context of smart cities.

The provision of telecommunication services in this scenario needs an innovative approach that manages advanced communication systems dynamically and autonomously, to comply with the diverse requirements of every particular service and application. In order to be effective, the solutions also need to be scalable, highly dependable, and able to provide ultra low-latency data delivery where needed. It must be noted that, although 5G is perceived as wireless access by the user, communication facilities and different users need to be connected through backhaul networks -either using optical fibre networks or radio links- and backbone networks, and thus an integrated approach is needed to include these segments as well.

To demonstrate the societal impact of the proposed solutions, 5GCity focuses on one of the situations that are most challenging for communication systems nowadays: unexpected events involving a relatively large number of mobile users concentrating in a small area, such in the case of hotspot traffic due to congestion or accidents, disasters, or emergency situations involving many users. The integrated adaptiveness of the envisioned scalable solutions, together with their dependability and low-latency response, will largely facilitate the management of such critical events.

The general objective of this project is to provide adequate support for the smart city paradigm in the most challenging scenarios, namely unexpected, critical events involving a large number of citizens concentrating in a small geographic area. The approach is to develop an adaptive solution to control 5G technologies and configure communication services, maintaining low-latency requirements, adequate scalability characteristics and high dependability.