Research Use Case

Reference Use Case

POLITEHNICA is the leader of the first and only Romanian National Competence Centre for Climate Neutral Smart Cities. Together with ORO, as partner in this center, POLITEHNICA Campus is becoming a Smart and Climate Neutral Campus creating a test and validation environment for public authorities and startups to test new technologies and innovative solutions for a more climate neutral city, and, thus, to improve the overall quality of life for the citizens.

The Campus is a living lab and a Digital Twin that mirrors the campus infrastructure that is being implemented. The POLITEHNICA campus will act as the Romanian demo site, but the Smart Campus capabilities will extend virtually to the other clusters.

This Smart Campus living lab will be a place for co-creation between stakeholders, that will enhance user-driven open innovation in real-life settings having users testing and validating products and services for different scenarios. The POLITEHNICA campus covers 1km² and has pedestrian and driving roads that are governed by traffic signs (STOP, Speed Limitation, Speed bumpers). The Campus has more than 15 buildings for students and staff with two new green buildings with more than 8000 m2 each, one kindergarten and a primary school, a church, tennis/football and basketball courts, an event aula for 1,000 people, a library, a heat co-generation factory that is injecting part of the energy into the grid, a passive self-sustainable living home, and a printing factory. There are more than 30,000 people transiting each day the Campus, making it a small city.

This year, 5G small cells will be placed on the existing lighting poles, across the highly circulated areas in the POLITEHNICA Smart Campus. The small-cells (elements: micro-antennas, base-band-units-BBUs, remote-radio-units-RRUs, rectifiers, installation materials) are energy efficient, and they will be used for the eco-smart mobility and environment monitoring applications and will be connected in the 5G SA private core network from the ORO-POLITEHNICA 5G Lab.

Implementing 6G capabilities into the POLITEHNICA Smart Campus will enhance the digital twin capabilities and will enhance the testing and validation of new solutions that could be adopted by Public Administrations. The POLITEHNICA Campus will become the first Romanian 6G living lab test site for all the relevant stakeholders.

For example, one of the sub-use-cases of the Smart Campus would be smart mobility. The data intensive transfer of information, from the car to the infrastructure/network, in a V2X scenario over the 6G networks would integrate technologies such as Multi Access Edge Computing, AI for CN, communication and positioning.

Climate neutrality will be one of the main criteria of evaluating the value of the proposed technologies, for the public authorities, and, in this use-case, the digital twin will monitor this aspect.

Other possible use cases:

• Smart Mobility and Transportation
  • Autonomous Vehicle Testing
  • Traffic Flow Optimization
  • Eco-Smart Mobility Solutions
• Environmental Monitoring and Sustainability
  • Real-Time Environmental Sensing
  • Energy Efficiency Solutions
  • Sustainable Infrastructure Management
• Community and Well-being
  • Smart Healthcare Solutions
  • Enhanced Safety and Security
  • Community Engagement Platforms
• Sports and recreation
  • Smart Sports Facilities
  • Event Management and Logistics
• Infrastructure and Facility Management
  • Smart Buildings
  • Building Digital Twin Implementation

Based on the above description of the infrastructure that we have, we can cover the following scenarios:

• Integration of our 5G/6G testbeds into the consortium scenario
• Heterogenous orchestration for multi-site deployment
• Expand our slicing services to AI-native network slice architecture.
• Expand the research in the field of Network as a sensor, by using the POLITEHNICA Smart Campus as the physical environment.
• Advancements in Sensing, Mapping, and Localization, as well as in channel estimation using AI