Main results

The overall project goal is to facilitate the digitalization of our society by providing ubiquitous access to high-end digital services like remote healthcare to all user devices independently of geography (urban/rural). Making 5G services available to the entire population in an economically viable way and ensuring the management of the combined access, 5G and in-home networks within one system are essential to achieve this goal.

For this, the project will develop a set of novel transmission technologies around the deployment and extension of fibre access networks up to the end user devices through wired and wireless transport together with means to preserve QoS and to measure the QoS that is being guaranteed to the user up to the end device (e.g. tablets, mobile phones). In addition, the project will investigate the economics behind the deployment and maintenance of the end-to-end systems (including the optical access system). This will result in a pan-European Fibre-To-The-Home (FTTH) roll-out, both as true FTTH and the fibre-copper hybrid G.mgfast. Furthermore, Passive Optical Networks (PON) will be prepared for carrying Mobile Transport. Enabling Mobile Transport over the FTTH network will further facilitate the FTTH adoption by sharing the cost of the fibre investments over the fixed and mobile ecosystems.

Networking activities are at the heart of A5GARD project since we will develop new wired transmission systems to optimize, maintain and extend fibre networks. This novel ICT infrastructure will of course provide higher speeds but will also be designed to minimize the latency on the in-home segments and to guarantee QoS up to the end user device.

As e-health is of special concern as a service applied within the project, it is expected that the project will adapt and further develop novel secure IoT technologies to medical applications and safely allow remote health monitoring solutions. With the new technologies we expect to be able to provide highly cost-efficient connectivity solutions to the e-health area.