Message from the General Chair
It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the 29th and first on-line edition of the European Conference on Networks and Communications.
The EuCNC is the key event to showcase the excellence of European research and innovation in communication technologies. This year the organisers turned it to an on-line event as the Covid-19 pandemic did not allow us to hold the conference in Dubrovnik as initially planned.
With the third and last phase of the 5G-Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) well under way, the projects will have the opportunity to show the way for new use cases and deliver on Europe’s 5G-trial strategy. The whole 5G-PPP trial project portfolio is now worth more than € 300 million of EU funding, and will leverage more than € 1 billion of private investment in 5G vertical trials, reinforcing Europe’s leading position in this field.
Another wave of projects for approximately € 200 million will be launched this year under the last Work Programme of Horizon 2020. A second wave of 5G Corridor projects as well as projects in the area of 5G hardware innovation are about to be signed. The last two calls are closing in June featuring 5G software innovation and more forward looking projects Beyond-5G.
While our efforts are focused on the development of 5G lead markets in Europe, excellence in R&I and Europe’s technology capacities for this and the next decade are of key importance. This has been recognised in the political guidelines of the new Commission and in the recent 5G cyber-security toolbox, in particular as regards the role of suppliers. These aspects have further gained importance in light of the Covid-19 crisis and the need to guarantee security of supply in critical sectors.
In the area of Networks and Communications European players are well placed, both in terms of supply market shares and of intellectual property. We have to maintain and reinforce this position and extend it to the broader value chain. This includes opportunities in components and devices beyond smartphones as well as cloud-based service provisioning to enable AI and the data economy. Against this background we are preparing a strategic European partnership on “Smart Networks and Services” as a successor to the 5G-PPP. It will be the research partnership for 6G, but also coordinate deployment actions to build 5G lead markets in a wide range of vertical sectors. I am looking forward to developing and running this partnership with you all.
We wish you a very fruitful and enjoyable EUCNC’2020 online conference.
Pearse O’Donohue
Conference General Chair
Message from the Technical Programme Committee Chairs
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 29th edition of the European Conference on Networks and Communications EuCNC 2020, which was supposed to take place in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
However, due to the well-known unfortunate circumstances that have almost shut down the world, the event turned to virtual. So, unfortunately, at this time, we will not have a chance to show and demonstrate to you all good things that we have been carefully preparing throughout almost two years for you to see, feel and taste in our beautiful city, the jewel of the Mediterranean.
Nevertheless, still we are delighted that we have lived up the motto “The Connectivity Revolution”, preserving the wide recognition of EuCNC as the premier forum for presentation of research results, and being the best meeting point for technology visionaries and innovators from academia and industry to exchange their newest results and experience, paving the way to the overall success in this cutting-edge industry, aimed to revolutionize the mission of ICT in general.
As 5G is on its way to maturity, vision on beyond-5G, as well as even 6G, is under way to provide much more than just an evolution to even wider bandwidth and lower latency, but become a key enabler of end-to-end solutions through solving ever growing challenges in research and development, manufacturing and exploitation of the exciting new technologies for connecting the world at a pace it has never seen before.
The EuCNC heritage dates all the way back to 2G, and continues up to nowadays when stateof-the-art high-bandwidth and real-time 5G systems have become a key enabler of many new and unexpected application areas, among them autonomous driving, vehicle-to-everything communications, (industrial) Internet-of-Things with massive machine-type communications, as well as ultra-reliable low latency communications among others.
In this EuCNC edition, 134 submissions were received from 44 countries, not only from Europe, but also as much as 24.9 % from other regions, namely Asia/Pacific, USA, Middle East and Africa, Canada and Latin America. Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers, with an overall acceptance rate of 50%.
Both on Tuesday, June 16th, and Wednesday, June 17th, the conference program starts and ends with a highlight of the latest research trends provided by renowned keynote speakers from academy and industry, whereas the panels will be centered on open RAN, Cybersecurity and 5G for verticals. Accepted papers and posters are organized in 6 tracks and 16 sessions.
We thank all authors for submitting their manuscripts, as well as the track co-chairs and reviewers for their devotion to selecting high quality contributions. Special thanks go to European Commission, the EuCNC 2020 sponsor and IEEE, as well as to Huawei Technologies, our Platinum Patron.
Finally, we would like to emphasize the hard work of the Local Organising Committee consisting of our young colleagues, and we thank them for their enthusiasm even when we realized that this event could not be organized the way we all planned and gladly expected.
We hope that you will enjoy the EuCNC 2020 program and consider contributing to EuCNC 2021 to be held in Porto, Portugal.
Vlatko Lipovac
Technical Programme Committee Chair
Filipe Cardoso
Technical Programme Committee Co-Chair