European Collaborators Kick Off Meeting of CogNet

The COGNET (Cognitive Networks) Project which received funding of €5.97m under Horizon 2020’s call for 5GPPP will see industry and research collaborators arrive in Ireland today from Spain, Italy, Germany and Israel to particpate in the first ‘kick off’ meeting, one of many meetings which will be held over the coming 30 months.

The goal of the project is to make a major contribution towards autonomic management of telecoms network infrastructure through using the available network data and applying Machine Learning algorithms to yield insights, recognise events and conditions and respond correctly to them.

Waterford Institute of Technology’s Telecommunications and Software Systems (TSSG) will lead the European consortium in a European Union (EU)-funded project in the 5G telecommunications area. The project recognises that 5G technology will support billions of connected devices, and that conventional IT systems and architectures are not currently designed to handle this scale.

IBM in Ireland, one of the collaborators on the project, will host the kick off meeting at its Technology Campus in Dublin. One of the key goals of the project is to develop machine learning, data mining, autonomic technologies and algorithms that will be applied to enterprise scale 5G deployments, delivering self adapting solutions that will adapt centralised architectures to distributed solutions that can handle substantial scale.

The project will develop solutions that will provide a higher and more intelligent level of automated monitoring and management of networks and applications, improve operational efficiencies and facilitate the requirements of 5G. The project will also conduct and exploit leading research in the areas of data gathering, machine learning, data analytics and autonomic network management. The ultimate objective is to enable the larger and more dynamic network topologies necessary in 5G, improve the end-user QoS, and to lower capital and operational costs through improved efficiencies and the use of node, link and function virtualisation.

Central to the project’s remit is the anticipated 11.5 billion mobile-ready devices in the world by 2020, as well as the growth of connected devices through the Internet of Things, the existing mobile and wireless bandwidth will be insufficient to cope with Europe’s ever-increasing data demands. Significantly more wireless capacity is therefore required to avoid bottle-necking Europe’s expanding digital economy, and this must be provided in an energy efficient manner while providing a better quality of experience to the end user than today’s technology.

Leading the project will be Robert Mullins from Waterford Institute of Technology’s Telecommunications and Software Systems (TSSG), key collaborators include IBM, telecommunications providers Alcatel Lucent, Telefonica, as well as Vicomtech, Interoute, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Technische Universität, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, and University of Trento.

The COGNET (Cognitive Networks) Project will host its first kick off meeting from July 15^th – July 16^th at IBM Ireland’s Technology Campus in Dublin. The Project will run until January 1 2018.

The project will conduct and exploit leading research in the areas of data gathering, machine learning, data analytics and autonomic network management. The ultimate objective is to enable the larger and more dynamic network topologies necessary in 5G, improve the end-user QoS, and to lower capital and operational costs through improved efficiencies and the use of node, link and function virtualisation.