Overview
The University of Oulu and the University of Tokyo will establish a living lab campus testbed, treating the campuses—where students and faculty engage in real-world activities—as microcosms of society and future cities. This will lead to the creation of a "Next-Generation Cyber Infrastructure Living Lab" model, in which both technology providers and users can co-create operationally viable research outcomes. By deploying a local 5G demonstration environment on the campuses of both universities, we aim to implement the "democratization of information and communication," where all stakeholders become providers of information and communication services. This will further evolve into Beyond 5G technologies, allowing universities themselves to verify their role as future providers of communication technology, showcasing a model case for swift societal implementation.
Similarly, if the Top Researcher Circle pursued in this project expands globally, it would be possible to create a global community that develops technologies and validates the social acceptability of new innovations. This would involve collaboration between testbeds such as Oulu University's 5GTN, OuluZone, the PAWR project, which uses U.S. cities as testbeds, the Slices testbed network expanding across Europe, and the campus testbed at the University of Surrey.
Initiatives
Building the Campus Testbed at the University of Tokyo
The University of Tokyo will expand its demonstration experiment environments across more than three campuses and properties. Although the Hongo campus has already obtained local 5G licenses at more than 10 locations, there is still much to be done in terms of industry-academia collaboration experiments, particularly with global companies. The university aims to build a campus testbed capable of international industry-academia collaboration. The University of Oulu has already constructed the 5G Test Network (5GTN) in cooperation with VTT and has built a large testbed, OuluZone, with support from Nokia, which provides a demonstration environment for 5G use cases. Tuomo, a joint researcher, visited the project proposer in July 2023 to discuss the collaboration between 5GTN, OuluZone, and the testbeds. Moving forward, we will conduct joint research on the development of base stations for Local 6G and international collaborative experiments.
