On behalf of the SLICES community, we are very excited to announce that SLICES-Spain will have a headquarters in Madrid! Spearheaded by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and IMDEA Networks Institute, this groundbreaking initiative will be fully operational by 2024, with some initial services already active since October 2023.
At the national level, SLICES-Spain operates through a strategic network structure. The main node, known as SLICES-Madrid, is hosted at UC3M-IMDEA in Madrid, while the secondary node, SLICES-EHU, is located in the Basque Country. These nodes work together seamlessly within SLICES-Spain, which plays an integral role in the broader SLICES-RI framework. SLICES-Madrid serves as the central coordinating hub, managing the integration of secondary nodes into the infrastructure and liaising with governmental authorities to ensure smooth operations.
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, IMDEA Networks Institute and the Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea are participating in the Spanish SLICES node (SLICES-ES). Specifically, the first infrastructure open to the European scientific community for testing in the field of telecommunications and with a very powerful Internet of Things (IoT) satellite service with Europe-wide coverage will be established in Madrid.
“It is therefore a very important milestone because what it represents is that Europe is aware of the need to have strategic autonomy in information technologies. We must join forces to improve our R&D capabilities in this regard,” says Arturo Azcorra, director of IMDEA Networks and a professor at UC3M. He also adds: “This is great news, therefore, for the academic and business world, and for society. We can consider it to be a global milestone in the field of open experimentation via satellite”.
During the official presentation of the national Spanish node early October, which took place at the Hotel Riu Plaza de España, researchers working in areas and platforms related to the Spanish SLICES node at different levels took part. For example, Carlos Jesús Bernardos, professor at UC3M, and Joerg Widmer, research director at IMDEA Networks, spoke about how it will be used in the development of 6G and in experimentation with millimetre wave networks.
The open infrastructure includes a powerful satellite-based IoT service covering all of Europe, along with telecommunications testing capabilities for advanced experimentation in 6G. Researchers will have access to cutting-edge deployments for experiments that were previously inaccessible or simply didn’t exist.
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