Nokia on Tuesday officially launched the 5G Mobile Network Architecture (MoNArch) research project funded by the European Union as part of the political bloc’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme which recognizes the initiative as one of the steps in the second phase of its 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP). As previously proposed, the 13 other partners participating in the project will be led by Nokia and seek to implement the fifth generation of mobile networks, establishing a number of real-world testing scenarios with the ultimate goal of furthering the advancement of this emerging technology.
The 5G MoNArch research project will place a particular focus on network slicing and its applications in a broad range of vertical industries including healthcare and entertainment, the Finnish tech giant said earlier today. This approach to network management is believed to be an efficient use of Nokia’s software expertise as it favors logical sectorization over physical solutions, essentially creating numerous logical networks within a single physical one. Such networks would support only individual services or a small branch of related solutions in an effort to improve efficiency and given how 5G is expected to support a wide variety of different services, network slicing should prove to be a popular technique employed by mobile service providers, meaning telecommunications equipment manufacturers need to ramp up their efforts in this segment, Nokia suggested.
The company’s partners involved in 5G MoNArch come from six European countries and have various backgrounds, with the consortium being supported by continental divisions of Samsung and Huawei, as well as the likes of Deutsche Telekom, Atos, and Mobics. The consortium has 14 partners in total and is set to experiment with real-world 5G implementations for the next two years, operating with a budget of €7.7 million ($9.06 million). The initiative is also seeking to evolve the current architectural designs and consequently facilitate the advancements in network technologies, in addition to pursuing functional solutions aimed at improving the security, flexibility, and resilience of 5G technologies, Nokia said. The consortium is expected to share more details on its endeavors in the coming months and it remains to be seen how its activities will relate to Nokia’s own predictions that 5G will pose some “near-term risk” for the Finnish company.