Dissemination activities

ETSI IoT Week 2022

The 2022 edition of the ETSI IoT Week, “Pursuing Digital and Green Transformation”, consisted in a series of events that offered to the community an up-to-date overview of the major European and global trends in IoT services, technology innovations, deployments, and the relevant standardization work, highlighting new initiatives and directions of IoT in the context of green and digital transformation.

The event was focused on:
– IoT technologies and innovations (semantics and ontologies, digital twins, IoT and edge, IoT and AI among others);
– IoT for a better life, including digital and green transformation and eHealth;
– Horizontal ETSI IoT standards for the vertical business sectors

The Role of the Edge in IoT-based Railway Diagnostic Satellite and 5G Integrated Networks

The speech has been part of a session devoted to the role of the Edge in IoT solution and services, a topic of interest on ETSI side, that backs the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) standardization up and on the Telco Industry one, that is pushing towards Cloud-native infrastructure and Cloud Edge paradigms. DINoS5G Project perfectly fits with this approach, since the DINoS5G concept is well ahead of the capability offered by the technology maturity of products deployed at the core of live networks, making fruitful to shift most of the key functions at the Edge by design. The speech has presented the scope of DINoS5G, highlighting the needs addressed by the Communication Platform prototyped, developed and tested during the Project and focusing on the integration of network resources from both Satellite and 5G infrastructure, that has led to the development of a multi-domain service orchestration framework. As anticipated, in DINoS5G view the key control functions are deployed at the Edge through the project-designed entities named “Edge Node”, that are in charge to offer anytime and anywhere the most suitable transport service to the diagnostic application, by triggering the service orchestration chain to collect network resource availability information and select the proper access network to send the traffic to accordingly.

The Edge Node, by means of a service orchestration interaction with the SatCom Network Management System, can even reconfigure the satellite bearer service, if compatible with SatCom subnetwork overall resource availability. The Edge Node functions and services have been extensively described to the ETSI audience, rising interest and questions from several of them.

The Project has been further discussed with reference to a possible next phase targeting the product development during a Panel with all the presenters of speeches in the session related to the role of Edge in IoT, paving the way to a roadmap of evolution in line with ETSI-defined standards at the Edge.

Network X 2022

Network X is one of the most comprehensive Telco event in the world, the new home of the long-running 5G World and Broadband World Forum, which will be joined by the newly launched Telco Cloud, designed to cover the full spectrum of the telecoms ecosystem. Not only is Network X supported by leading telco brands including Light Reading and Telecoms.com, it is also shaped by Founding Partners, who ensure the event represents the full industry.

5G and satellite communication for predictive maintenance of railway infrastructure

  • The Project has originated from looking at the application problem faced by any major railway infrastructure operator: several hundreds, currently, and several thousands, in the future, of diagnostic units (LDUs, Local Data Units) need to dynamically transfer data collected from rail and environment sensors to a limited number of central data units (CDUs, Central Data Units) in charge of processing data, perform business intelligence with them, and provide ”predictive”  maintenance instead of just “failure-event-triggered” interventions. The current communication legacy available to LDUs and CDUs may not meet very much needed requirements like massive data transfer, minimum latency and availability of underlying resources, particularly in the thousands of miles covered by a railway network outside urban areas.  
  • A flexible communication platform, leveraging on integrated resources from a hybrid Satellite and 5G communication infrastructure, would meet – in an optimal way with possible trade offs – the requirements of such Maintenance application. The Project has indeed designed and prototyped such a hybrid infrastructure, by providing what we call the DINoS5G Architecture. The essence of the Architecture is to provide LDUs with both 5G RAN and SAT RAN access, to be used in alternation or in combination, depending on requirements and current network conditions, load and availability. 
  • Integrated communication is provided by an ad-hoc EdgeNode attached to each LDU. The main feature of DINoS5G EdgeNode consists in smartly steering railway diagnostic traffic through the RAN access that best suits transfer requirements, taking into account 5G network or SAT network conditions (performance indicators) measurable at a given point in time and space. 
  • 5G network or SAT network conditions and steering solutions are automatically “computed” through a multi-domain service orchestration, both in terrestrial and non-terrestrial domain, which assumes management of virtualized resources. 
  • The platform developed and set up by the Project is currently undergoing extensive on-field trials, to characterize  functionality and end-to-end performance of different delivery chains from LDUs to CDUs, obtainable from all possible outcomes of steering decisions. 
  • Trial use cases include Satellite network inventory, Service provisioning as proper chaining of network resources with given performance parameters and SAT/5G network KPI monitoring.
  • The Trials are being performed on a real railway network represented by a railway circuit devoted to conformance approval of new trains and machinery, with real sensors, placed on ground on or near the rails (wayside sensors), and with a fully operational diagnostic train, pre-existing to DINoS5G but fitted with DINoS5G communication facilities. 
  • Outcomes from the Trials will be fed into a Validation process, to obtain indications whether the DINos5G platform would be worth being engineered and scaled-up to a geographical extension and whether a workable business plan can be drafted for operational exploitation

WCRR 2022

With the Covid-19 pandemic having huge and long-lasting impact on the rail sector, the new knowledge and novel solutions generated by research are even more important than before and they will be essential in the recovery. Increasing research quality and speed, putting the findings quickly into action and fostering international co-operation to work together on the common challenges faced by the railways will be key to our ability to attract customers back, deliver great value for money and lead on transport sustainability.


WCRR 2022 bring together the global community to explore this theme over the course of an exciting five day programme of activities. The Congress show technical development, advocate collaboration and inspire the next generation of rail professionals.

An innovative approach in interfacing Diagnostic Application protocols for the RFI Network with legacy communication stack

The World Congress of Railwyay Research (WCRR) is the most important congress event dedicated to research and innovation in the railway sector. Held for the first time in 1994, the 2022 edition was the thirteenth and took place in Birmingham, UK. WCRR is the only cross-thematic congress in the world dedicated to the subject of innovation in the railway sector, addressing everyone from railway companies to industry and research institutions. The speech concerning the DINoS5G project was part of a session dedicated to innovations in the context of “Condition based maintenance and novel inspection”. DINoS5G proposes an innovative approach to efficient predictive maintenance, considering 5G telecommunication integrated with satellite technologies with reference to the subnetwork serving the diagnostic network.

In the new proposed architecture approach, any peripheral diagnostic unit can generate monitoring data and transmit them to a central post, based on priority parameters and the state of connectivity, whether to use either 5G RAN access or the satellite access. To this purpose, a new component in the railway diagnostic network, named the “Edge Node”, has been introduced, capable of transparently choosing the most suitable access depending on parameters contained and the data transfer requests of such entities. The DINoS5G communication architecture represents a functional enhancement of the backhaul network, providing a unified solution able to self-adapt to a wide range of application services.