Plaza6G (Polo de Innovación y Experimentación 6G) and Plaza6G+
Plaza6G (Polo de Innovación y Experimentación 6G, TSI-064100-2022-16) and Plaza6G+ (TSI-064100-2023-26) projects aim to build a reference general purpose infrastructure for experimentation in advanced mobile networks that was easy for the user and was conceived as a general-purpose innovation hub that was a reference in experimentation in advanced 5G, 6G and future generations. An open experimentation hub of this magnitude will allow the academic community and different sectors of the industry to access an experimentation platform that is difficult to replicate.
The development of Plaza6G is based on the integration on an existing advanced testbed, Extreme, to which three important elements will be added. First, in order to build a hierarchical continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) environment, the creation, development, and deployment of the experiment will be formulated in terms of what is commonly referred to as network CI/CD. Second, end-to-end instrumentation will allow not only the measurement of all types of metrics, but also the management of all phases of the experiment life cycle. Plaza6G will provide three types of environments that will adapt to the different stages of technology development and evaluation interests of researchers: simulation, indoor lab, and outdoors.
Plaza6G+ has been conceived as an ambitious extension of the Plaza6G project. Plaza6G+ will improve the infrastructure and equipment of Plaza6G, focusing on five differentiated contributions: 1) infrastructural scaling of Plaza6G, including network expansion, computing capacity and GPUs; 2) deployment of open radio access networks (open RAN) through the development and deployment of architectures aligned with the O-RAN Alliance specifications; 3) enabling the management of private outdoor and indoor 5G networks complemented by small/micro/pico/femto cell technologies; 4) integrating new equipment to enable multiple use cases and enable spaces towards 6G, such as AR/VR/XR (metaverse), eHealth, digital twin, among others; and 5) usability improvement, including new use cases, through the development of new control and monitoring functionalities through APIs and the web platform.
Plaza6G and Plaza6G+ users will be able to test and develop new products and services that require a high-performance network, supporting different scenarios such as negligible latencies or high bandwidth. In summary, the project will offer a completer and versatile platform for experimentation in advanced networks, thus improving the synergy between multiple parties involved in the development of use cases and next-generation network technologies towards 6G.
The implications in society and economy of Plaza6G and Plaza6G+ will be diverse, becoming a neutral point (managed by a non-profit research center) that will promote synergies between the multiple parties involved in the development of network technologies and applications, thus becoming an innovation hub.
