NRG-5
Enabling Smart Energy as a service via 5G Mobile Network advances
Supporting Smart Energy as a Service is a promising application for 5G mobile network communications. NRG-5 will enable the deployment, operation and management of existing and new 5G communications and energy infrastructures, providing security, resilience and high availability mechanisms.
Despite the numerous software frameworks and reference architectures created for 5G enabling technologies, there is still a clear gap to fill towards 5G seamless application in a number of “vertical” sectors. The energy sector represents, undoubtedly, one of the most significant “test cases” for 5G enabling technologies, due to the need of addressing a huge range of very diverse requirements across a variety of applications (stringent capacity for smart metering/AMI versus latency for supervisory control and fault location). However, to effectively support energy utilities along their transition towards more decentralized renewable-oriented systems, several open issues still remain as to 5G networks management automation, security, resilience, scalability and portability.
To overcome these issues, NRG-5 will research and develop a novel 5G PPP-compliant software framework specifically tailored to the energy domain, addressing in particular:
- The need for a decentralized, trusted, scalable and lock-in free plug ‘n’ play mechanism;
- Secure, scalable and energy-efficient communication requirements provided by traceable VNFs (Virtual Network Functions);
- A micro-cloud extended Mobile Edge Computing open source software stack;
- An extended 5G ETSI-MANO predictive analytics framework supporting automated dynamic, elastic VNF reconfiguration.
State of the art 5G laboratories and real-life trials will support the development and validation activities. Ultimately, recommendations on 5G scalability, resilience and high availability will be provided to address requirements on handling Critical Infrastructure Service Level Agreements.
The Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems will significantly contribute to the research activities by integrating 5G technologies with state-of-the-art real time simulation of electrical grids, providing the possibilities of a holistic development, evaluation and validation of the NRG-5 solutions.
Announcements
The NRG-5 project had its final review in Brussels on February 13th 2020. The project consortium presented the results achieved during the duration of the research and innovation project. ACS, represented by Manuel Pitz and Gianluca Lipari, demonstrated the concepts and technologies developed during the project, in particular with respect to the system integration and laboratory evaluation.
The GA of the Association DERlab (in which ACS is member since 2018) was held together with a workshop on 25th and 26th of February at the Enel Green Power Innovation Hub in Catania, Italy. ACS was represented by David Raisz, who gave a short introduction to the Institute's research on 5G technology, used in RESERVE, NRG5 and SOGNO.
Dr. Gianluca Lipari and Manuel Pitz attended the fourth NRG5 plenary project meeting. The meeting was organized in Ipswich by British Telecommunications.
Dr. Gianluca Lipari, Mirko Ginocchi and Manuel Pitz attended the third NRG5 plenary project meeting. The meeting was organized by University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris.
ACS, represented by Gianluca Lipari and Manuel Pitz, attended the second NRG5 project meeting in Athens, hosted by TEISTE - Technological Education Institute of Sterea Ellada.
The 5G-PPP phase 2 project NRG-5 held the kick-off meeting in Rome. Gianluca Lipari participated for ACS. The NRG-5 project aims to contribute to the 5G PPP/5G Initiative research and development activities, by delivering a novel 5G-PPP compliant, decentralized, secure and resilient framework, with highly availability, able to homogeneously model and virtualize multi-homed, static or moving, hardware constrained (smart energy) devices, edge computing resources and elastic virtualized services over communications’ and energy utilities’ infrastructures.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under grant agreement no 762013.