Project LEAN

Deployment and operation of traditional network infrastructure are not economical sustainable to cover scarcely populated and very low ARPU areas in the world. 5G is the right time to mobilize the telecom ecosystem in order to define an architecture flexible enough to be deployed under ultra-low cots requirements in order to offer broadband Internet access in emerging countries rural areas fostering new business and new opportunities in underserved areas of the world.

4G was not designed with such requirements and is too costly for such deployments. 5G will have to cope with new requirements for the provision of minimal services over long distances in extreme rural areas and propose new Key Performance Indicators to define an affordable and scalable architecture to provide Internet access.

The project will extend the 5G 3GPP architecture to provide a new access radio technologies based on 3GPP requirements on 5G for these areas combined with complementary technologies (3GPP, terrestrial, satellite). To provide location independent flexibility for deploying in very large territories with low density of users, the project will consider satellites for backhaul and SDN/NFV technics in order to provide flexibility for controlling access and backhaul resources between multi-actors.

Our work will comprise the evolution of an existing integration platform to implement and evaluate this new 5G Ultra Low Cost protocol and also the development of on-site demonstration.