Cybersecurity technologies protect our digital assets, ranging from personal digital belongings to societal and state level digital belongings, and their connectivity. This is all crucial for our society and therefore it is natural to assume that there should be no dearth of resources for ensuring it. However, the sustainability of cybersecurity is also extremely important, but rarely discussed. For example, all resources should not be concentrated on certain types of threats, leaving no resources for protection from other kinds of threats. A balanced approach should be adopted, where protection from all threats at the same time is always possible with existing computing, memory, and spectrum resources. Furthermore, security is also an enabler of sustainability, since efficient security ensures that resources are used only for legitimate purposes. Therefore, the SUNSET-6G project investigates sustainable cybersecurity approaches in the 6G ecosystem. Sustainability of security technologies is evaluated in terms of energy, spectrum, processing, and memory, as well as human resources. The SUNSET-6G (Sustainable Network Security Technologies for 6G) project is a three-year Business Finland funded research project, under the 6G-Bridge program. All the research will be performed at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The project is led by Dr. Ijaz Ahmad. The SUNSET-6G project is carried out in cooperation with prominent industrial partners with vast relevant experience in the cybersecurity domain: WithSecure, Nokia, Satel and Eficode. This makes the SUNSET-6G a very valuable project. 

Digital transformation is ongoing in many areas of today’s society, which will impact many aspects of people’s lives via means such as smart cities, robotic, transportation, and next-generation industries. At the same time, the current centralized cloud infrastructure is not adequate to serve the transformation’s requirements. We believe that three technologies can come together to shape a new secure service and application platform; 5G, edge-centric compute & artificial intelligence. In this context, European industry has a good position in 5G networks, transportation and industrial applications, but need to strengthen the position in a secure cloud, data centre and artificial intelligence technologies to be at the front of the development.The primary objective of the AI-NET project is to provide enablers and solutions for high-performance services deployed and operated at the network edge. To manage complexity, we need to take advantage of artificial intelligence to complement traditional optimisation algorithms. Currently, deep edge network nodes will be deployed at locations not prepared for the power requirements of edge-centric compute. To answer this, we need to analyse requirements and develop methods to minimize energy consumption. More..

The aim of the H2020 EuWireless project is to study the technical, legal and economic solutions that encourage mobile network providers to share their infrastructures with universities, research centres and small businesses. This project comes under the framework of new infrastructure designs resulting from European research. The consortium comprises the University of Málaga (coordinator), VTT (Finland), DEKRA Testing and Certification (Spain), NORDUnet (Denmark), IS-wireless (Poland) and Time.lex (Belgium).

On a technical level, the aim of the project is to design viable solutions for sharing parts of the mobile network with the research community. This will be acheived by first examining current mechanisms and those under development, to share the range, the access nodes, the transport network and the core network. For instance, although the MOCN and DECOR solutions will be considered, the project will also advance in sharing solutions, as defined in 5G networks (slicing mechanisms for services with SDN, NFV, 5Gcore, etc). More..

The project studies optimal use of Industrial Edge Computing for increasing manufacturing business profitability through improved productivity, security and safety, while maintaining low production infrastructure maintenance and investment costs. Improved productivity can be achieved through higher-capacity communication and higher availability of management systems. Security and safety improve the profitability by decreasing incidents hindering the production and supply chain operation. The automatized operation and optimized function placement help reducing costs through decreased maintenance requirements and better resource-efficiency. The project aims to systematically address the identified key challenges by conducting research on: 1) Adaptive, reliable and failure tolerant edge architecture, 2) Scalable and efficient control and logistics management, and 3) Secure, resilient and efficient communication and data management. The project approaches the identified research questions through an industrial process and logistics management use case. The project will utilize and further develop emerging technologies, such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), distributed IoT Edge computing,  5G networks and Blockchain. The economic and strategic impacts of the project research area are tremendous and the used testbeds provide a unique platform for innovation and entrepreneurship, with future commercial potential. 

The Celtic-Plus SIGMONA project, SDN Concept in Generalized Mobile Network Architectures, will study network architectures and functions for evolution of the LTE/EPC (3GPP) mobile networks. The main focus is on the network, although and end-to-end system approach, including the LTE radio system, will be taken. The project will apply the latest networking and computing technologies and architectures onto the LTE/EPC mobile network. The project aims at evaluation, specification and validation of a Software Defined Mobile Network concept designed onto the software defined networking (SDN), network virtualization and cloud computing principles. The project will provide an insight into the feasibility and opportunities of such network concepts, as well as evaluate the limits of performance and scalability of the new technologies applied on mobile broadband networks. New opportunities for traffic, resource and mobility management will be studied. New challenges on network security and solutions for those will be addressed. Network virtualization solutions in the mobile transport networks, as well as effects on the network monitoring and network management solutions are relevant, too. Use cases, such as content delivery will be considered. It is also foreseen that the investments on the network and operational costs would change, hence the project will also outline the impact onto cost of network, value chain and business models. The model of open interfaces, the role of standards and related bodies will also be described. More..