InterDigital joins 5GROWTH project to advance 5G solutions for vertical industries

InterDigital, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDCC), a mobile and video technology research and development company, today announced its participation in the 5GROWTH project. Part of the third phase of the H2020 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) initiative, 5GROWTH is aimed at empowering vertical industries with automated and intelligent 5G solutions.

5GROWTH aims to use field trials to validate and optimize the performance of 5G systems deployed on the premises of vertical industries – including Industry 4.0, transport and energy – using automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven solutions.

InterDigital will contribute to the deployment and validation of 5G technologies for the Industry 4.0 pilot use cases, combining latency-sensitive mission critical automation with bandwidth-intensive video applications over 5G. InterDigital will also contribute software-defined virtualized platforms for distributed edge and fog computing. These solutions were originally developed as part of the EU-Taiwan 5G-CORAL initiative, which was launched in September 2017 and targets a data-driven distributed services platform across the edge and fog for various applications, including immersive 360^o video and remote robot navigation. In addition, InterDigital will lead the standardization advisory committee set up in 5GROWTH to oversee the overall standardization dissemination into key standard development organizations such as 3GPP, IETF, and ETSI.

“Collaboration is critical to the validation and evolution of 5G, in particular to the support of vertical industry use cases. To unlock 5G’s full potential, projects such as 5GROWTH are essential, as the skillset and expertise contributed by each consortium member, including vertical industry stakeholders, significantly advances overall progression,” said Alain Mourad, Director of Engineering at InterDigital. “We are delighted to be contributing to 5GROWTH as it underpins one of our biggest focus areas for 2019 – 5G use cases – and builds on our recent 5G success.”

Launched in June 2019, 5GROWTH will begin activity with nine field trials in the industry 4.0, transport and energy sectors that will be conducted on four vertical-owned sites located in Spain, Italy and Portugal. The project is expected to run for two and a half years until the end of 2021.

5GROWTH is led by a consortium of 21 partners from seven European countries, they include: global vendors (Ericsson, InterDigital, NEC, Nokia), operators (Altice, Telecom Italia, Telefonica), vertical industries (COMAU, EFACEC, INNOVALIA), SMEs (Mirantis, Nextworks, Telcaria), and research institutes and universities (CTTC, Instituto de Telecomunicações, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Politecnico di Torino University, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and University Carlos III of Madrid). The project received a grant of €14.1M from the European Commission.

5GROWTH is part of H2020 5G-PPP, a joint initiative between the European Commission and European ICT industry which aims to deliver solutions, architectures, technologies and standards for the next generation of communication infrastructures of the coming decade.