Mobile World Congress 2024 – meet HaDEA-managed projects and discover EU advancements in the connectivity ecosystem

Mobile World Congress, taking place from 26 to 29 February at the Fira Gran Via in Barcelona, is an annual trade show dedicated primarily to the mobile communications industry. The congress consists of parallel conferences, workshops, tutorials, and exhibitions on the show floor. 

Several HaDEA-managed projects under Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020, Digital Europe Programme are attending the congress: Several projects managed by HaDEA are attending the congress:

• 5G4UH:  Stand 3E11, in Hall 3. 
• 5G-TIMBER: Stand 3N10 is in the Hall 3.
• AC3 and Vitamin-V: Stand CS220 in Hall Congress Square. Pr. Ramon Canal and Pr. Aaron Call will present the project Vitamin-V during the session “Next Generation Processors – RISC-V” on 28 February.
• COGNIT: OpenNebula’s booth in Hall 4, Stand 4C30 at the Spanish Pavilion. Representative Alberto P. Marti is participating in a roundtable on 27 February at 11.00 about “Digital Talent: How to adapt to the tools of the future” at the Spanish Pavilion.
• CONNECTOW and 5GENIUS: Citymesh’s stand 7G51, in Hall 7 under the Flanders Investment and Trade Pavilion.
• DigiAdvance: Stand 6B31, in Hall 6. Marta Portalés and Marjorie Grassler are representing the project in several sessions as on 27 February at 12.00 in the 4YFN zone with a panel on “Humanising Technology: Innovation Made by Women".
• ED5GE: Ericsson’s stand 2O60 in Hall 2.
• MEDCOR5G and BALTCOR5G: CELLNEX’s stand 4C50 in Hall 4.
• Möbius: Stand 8.1B55 in the 4YFN zone. Among other sessions, it organises a roundtable on 27 February at 12.00 with a demonstration of the project experimental productions.
• Zero-SWARM is presented by three members of the consortium: Stand 5D74 in Hall 5 (Opticoms), Stand 8.1B34.3A in Hall 8.1 (Neutroon), and Stand CS220 in Hall Congress Square (i2cat).

The projects

CEF Digital

• 5G4UH  seeks to make 5G technologies available in the health sector and facilitate ground-breaking changes in how medical services are performed to the public and the individual patient. Vodafone GmbH will deploy a leading-edge 5G infrastructure at the Frankfurt University Hospital in Germany, thus enabling innovative 5G use cases and improving the provision of public health services.
• 5GENIUS is the outcome of a cooperation between Citymesh and the University College of Ghent (HOGENT) to roll-out a 5G network and service. It seeks to address the growing need for high-speed connectivity on campus and provide HOGENT with cutting-edge network services supporting businesses and start-ups, students, and researchers.
• BALTCOR5G seeks to ensure uninterrupted and continuous 5G coverage along the Baltic cross-border sections of the corridor, by deploying infrastructure in areas where the market has failed to invest. Their goal is to deploy 5G infrastructure and C-v2x infrastructure connecting cross border road corridor sections to enable high quality seamless network coverage and handover.
• CONNECTOW merges Citymesh and the Belgian city of Wavre. They will build a state-of-the-art 5G private network complying with current security standards and attaining the highest level of performance. The project is working on a city-wide 5G network so that firefighters and police services can use safety drones in emergency situations.
• ED5GE’s objective is to deploy a 5G edge network infrastructure with the latest features such as network slicing and network-based positioning. The areas have different use case characteristics and societal benefits like Transport and Logistics efficiency, City traffic management, and Sustainable and efficient agriculture.
• MEDCOR5G aims to ensure uninterrupted and continuous 5G coverage along the cross-border sections of the Mediterranean corridor, by deploying infrastructure in areas where the market has failed to invest in the deployment of valuable passive/active infrastructure.

DIGITAL

• DigiAdvance responds to evidenced digital skills gaps, shortages, and mismatches in specialised technology areas such as blockchain, big data, and machine learning among SMEs. The project is designing and teaching regional digital skills courses for SME employees in local languages. Courses are complemented by a pan-European digital skills accelerator workshop series for business leaders.

Horizon 2020

• Möbius has been modernising the European book publishing industry by remodelling the traditional value chains and business models. It developed software tools that allow the production of new immersive and interactive book experiences, as 3D audio and binaural reproduction to improve the reading experience.

Horizon Europe

• 5G-TIMBER is developing 5G-enabled use cases (UCs) to accelerate the twin green and digital transformation of the wood manufacturing and construction sector. The aim is to help SME end-users optimise workflows, reduce waste, and improve safety, while strengthening the entire wood value chain. 
• AC3 is developing an agile framework to efficiently manage data in the cloud-edge computing continuum that will play a critical role in increasing service scalability, agility, and effectiveness. With a microservice architecture, it will be able to adapt to different network contexts and events, such as lack of resources, data deluge or movement of data sources.
• COGNIT is establishing a new distributed function-as-a-service (FaaS) paradigm for edge application management and smart orchestration. This AI-powered adaptive serverless framework will provide secure and portable access to a continuous data processing environment that abstracts the large-scale, geo-distributed, and low-latency capabilities provided by the cloud-edge continuum.
• Vitamin-V is deploying a complete RISC-V hardware-software stack for cloud services based on innovative cloud open-source technologies for RISC-V cores with a special focus on European Processor Initiative cores. It incorporates an innovative RISC-V virtual execution environment providing hardware emulation and simulation.
• Zero-SWARM is aiming to accelerate the uptake of advanced 5G technologies by European manufacturing sector. It seeks to achieve climate neutral and digitised production via a multidisciplinary, human centric, objective oriented innovative approach resulting in technical solutions for open swarm framework, non-public 5G network, active information continuum and digital twin.

Background 

CEF Digital will help support an unprecedented amount of investments devoted to safe, secure, and sustainable high-performance infrastructure. In particular, Gigabit and 5G networks across the EU. This action will be important in supporting Europe's digital transformation, as outlined in the Path to the Digital Decade proposal. Furthermore, CEF Digital will contribute to the increased capacity and resilience of digital backbone infrastructures in all EU territories, in particular the Outermost Regions. This is crucial for Europe's ambition to continue being digitally sovereign and independent in the years to come. 

Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL) aims to build the strategic digital capacities of the EU and to facilitate the wide deployment of digital technologies. With an overall budget of €7.5 billion, out of which €0.8 billion is managed by HaDEA, the programme will support investments in the following sectors: 

• High Performance Computing
• Cloud, data, and Artificial Intelligence
• Cybersecurity
• Advanced digital skills 
• Accelerating best use of technologies

Horizon 2020 was the EU’s multiannual funding programme between 2014 and 2020. H2020 provided Research and Innovation (R&I) funding for multi-national collaboration projects alongside individual researchers and SMEs via special funding instruments. Horizon 2020 is succeeded by the Horizon Europe Programme, which will run until 2027.