A group of 16 leading players in the field of telecommunications kicked off the “FANTASTIC-5G Project” (Flexible Air iNTerfAce for Scalable service delivery wiThin wIreless Communication networks of the 5th Generation) with the aim of developing a new air interface below 6 GHz for 5G networks.
Specifically, the 2-year FANTASTIC-5G project will develop a new multi-service air interface that is:
- Highly flexible, to support different types of data traffic.
- Scalable, to support an ever-growing number of networked devices.
- Versatile, to support diverse device types and traffic/transmission characteristics.
- Energy- and resource-efficient, to better use the available spectrum.
- Future-proofed, enabling easy upgrades to future software releases.
FANTASTIC-5G has received eight million Euros of funding by the European Commission under the EU´s “Horizon 2020” initiative aiming to advance digital Europe.
The members of FANTASTIC-5G include service providers (Orange, Telecom Italia), component and infrastructure vendors (Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Sequans Communications, Wings ICT Solutions), universities (Aalborg University, Politecnico di Bari, Institut Mines-Telecom/Telecom Bretagne, University of Bremen) and research institutes (Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives – Laboratoire d’électronique et de technologie de l’information (CEA-Leti), Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institut (HHI)) from Europe.
“FANTASTIC-5G is of key importance, as the multi-service air interface concepts being developed in the project will be evaluated and validated by the partners. This helps to build up consensus and to facilitate the standardization process of 5G”, says Frank Schaich from Alcatel-Lucent´s Bell Labs, who is leading the FANTASTIC-5G project.
