# Key Technologies in the Context of Future Networks: Operational and Management Requirements
## 3 Research Overview
With the aim to promote the adoption of 5G in Asia, China has launched the IMT-2020 promotion group [30], which manages five working groups: Requirements, Technology, Spectrum, Intellectual Property Right (IPR) and Standardization. This is the most important promotion platform related with research and international cooperation purposes. Similarly, coordinated efforts in the 5G area have been launched in South Korea and Japan, the former with the 5G Forum [31] and the latter with the Fifth Generation Mobile Communications Promotion Forum (5 GMF) [32]. Both are conducting research projects involving active participants from the government, industry, and academia, in order to facilitate the development of 5G. Significant efforts have been made in Europe under the support of the European Union Framework Project 7 (FP7) and the Horizon 2020 programmes [29]. On the one hand, FP7 has launched 5G research projects such as METIS, MCN, CONTENT, T-NOVA, UNIFY, CROWD, etc. On the other hand, Horizon 2020 has financed several research projects (considered by 5G PPP as Phase 1 Projects) such as 5G-NORMA, METIS II, CHARISMA, SONATA, FLEXSGWARE, SELFNET, among others. In the FP7 context, Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for the Twenty-twenty Information Society Project (METIS) [33] lays the foundations of 5G networks and promotes the general agreement to design this mobile environment. The first phase of this project (METIS I) includes five big scenarios (amazingly fast, great Services in a crowd, ubiquitous things communicating, best experience follows you, super real-time and reliable connections) in a use-case driven approach. The initiative Mobile Cloud Computing (MCN) [34] provides mobile services by means of the combination of three components: mobile network, compute, and storage resources. MCN defines a wide range of use cases, such as Radio Access Network (RAN) on Demand, Mobile Virtual Resources on Demand, Machine Type Communication on Demand, SDN or virtualized Evolved Packet Core (EPC), to mention a few. In the same way, the CONTENT project [35] proposes a network infrastructure that enables end-to-end cloud and mobile services. This project provides a virtualized infrastructure based on LTE, WIFI and optical metro networks and introduce the SDN concept in their deployment. CONTENT presents two general use cases: Infrastructure and network sharing (created logical resources) and cloud service provisioning on top of virtual infrastructures (end-to-end). The integration of SDN with NFV is proposed in T-NOVA [36] and UNIFY [37] projects. On one hand, T-NOVA provides a framework to deploy VNFs over network infrastructures. The innovation of this project consists of their NFV Apps marketplace, which enables the easy creation, deployment and management of virtual network appliances in a standardized environment. T-NOVA proposes three general scenarios: High-Level Scenario, T-NOVA VNFs, and VNF Chaining. On the other hand, the UNIFY project takes advantage of cloud computing and the virtualization concept to provide a novel network architecture with optimized data traffic flows and the dynamic placement of networking, computer and storage components. This project presents eleven use cases, organized around the following domains: Infrastructure Virtualization, Flexible Service Chaining and Network Service Chain Invocation for Providers. In the area of SDN and SON, CROWD [22] includes these technologies to enhance the coordination process between radio base stations in very dense and heterogeneous wireless networks (Dense Nets). This project allows the network cooperation, the dynamic network configuration, dynamic backhaul reconfiguration, energy optimization, etc. CROWD also presents fifteen use cases divided into two big scenarios: self-optimising dense networks and Optimised mobility in dense radio access networks.