PROJECT TITLE

NANCY: An Artificial Intelligent Aided Unified Network for Secure Beyond 5G Long Term Evolution

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

The NANCY project is going to enable personalized, multi-tenant, and perpetual protection wireless networking by developing three complementary technologies for beyond 5G systems in an integrated and innovative way.
NANCY will develop new radio access network (RAN) technologies using blockchain, that will boost the dynamic scalability of network capabilities by enabling the coordination of existing business and individual infrastructures, while, at the same time, will offer unpresented high security and privacy through post quantum cryptography (PQC).
NANCY will employ Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform beyond 5G RANs into intelligent platforms and introduce new service models to telecom/ISP and individual providers.
NANCY will exploit the opportunities emerging for Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) in order to provide almost-zero latency and high-computational capabilities at the edge. To realize this novel concept, NANCY proposed a novel RAN architecture, which combines the benefits of the blockchain, MEC, and AI, optimised by means of:

• An experimental-driven blockchain-RAN (B-RAN) information framework, according to which the role of each one of the network nodes can change from connectivity consumer to provider,
• AI-approaches for energy and cost-efficiency optimization as well as for supporting a wide range of applications with diverse requirements,
• Federated Learning approaches for ultra-secure connectivity, optimal and adaptive radio resource management and End-to-End (E2E) network optimization,
• Offloading and social-aware precaching approaches to support latency-sensitive applications, and
• Smart pricing policies that open the door to new business models.

8BELLS ROLE

Building upon the newly developed B-RAN and attacks models, 8BELLS will lead the development of a network information framework that quantifies the achievable performance of networks in different environments. Coverage probability and outage probability will be evaluated in an urban environment. Moreover, the network latency will be assessed for different consensus mechanisms and the trade-off between latency, computational complexity (power consumption), and security will be quantified. Additionally, 8BELLS will explore the means to deliver NANCY outcomes to the B5G market by developing a business plan targeted to SMEs and start-ups, 5G service providers, 5G infrastructure manufacturers and operators, cloud and providers and specialists, and verticals vendors. This plan will include on aspects related to: analysis of proposed solutions; analysis of the external and internal market; competition. Finally, the current and emerging market trends in the areas of B5G platform strategies will be analyzed.