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The telecommunication and ICT cluster Celtic-Plus awarded five exceptionally successful European co-operation projects at the event organised in Barcelona. The Excellence Award for Network Technologies was presented to the Nokia-led SIGMONA project, in which the solutions developed by Aalto University researchers have had an essential role.

The project focused on developing software-defined mobile networking technology, and the idea was to separate control functions from data forwarding functions. Consequently, the control functions can be run in data centres and the switching and forwarding functions can be kept as simple as possible, and, as a result, both can be scaled to suit customer needs more accurately than the current technologies, and the control functions can be centralised. Centralisation opens the possibility of using new network algorithms and policies which make it possible to handle the entire network or a large group of users all in the same way, or to treat each user individually.

The principle of a software-defined mobile network developed in the SIGMONA project has been adopted as the base for the 5G mobile network, and the results are applied directly in e.g. TAKE5 and 5G@II projects. As examples of Aalto University results, we have the software-defined mobile Core which, among other things, manages the mobility of devices and users and their access to the Internet, and a new type of Cooperative Firewall that can be used to better protect the end devices connected to e.g. the 5G network or the IoT network from security breaches.