SLICES-RI post-5G Blueprint deployment

About the Slices RI

SLICES RI is defined as a scientific instrument to support the discovery process related to the future, emerging digital infrastructures. It is a joint investment between the EU and the member states, on the ESFRI [1] roadmap since 2021.

SLICES avoids fragmentation and achieves critical mass by bringing together research communities related to networking protocols, radio technologies, data collection, parallel and distributed computing, and in particular cloud and edge-based computing architectures and services.

SLICES is a flexible platform designed to support large-scale, experimental research focused on all domains related to digital infrastructures [2].

As opposed to similar initiatives worldwide, SLICES is sustainable with a roadmap defined until 2040.

The SLICES blueprint is aimed at sharing the same vision and solutions among the partners as well as proposing a plan for the design and deployment of SLICES RI.

In this blueprint, we propose to define the infrastructure baseline augmented with a reference implementation, which aims at keeping a focus on the goals of the project, yet identifying technological challenges and breakthroughs at the early stage of the process. The blueprint shall be deployed by the SLICES-RI partners and will provide the baseline service that will be exposed to the experimenters when SLICES moves into the operation phase (continuous integration and deployment strategy starting mid-2024).

This blueprint is meant to continuously evolve in order to onboard lessons learned and recommendations from the community, both academia and industry. For more detailed information, you can read the paper [3].