Keep up to date with our innovative initiatives.
Sign up here
The i2CAT Research Centre is one of the founding members of the newly launched SDG OpenOP Group within ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute). This new initiative stems from the Horizon Europe project SUNRISE-6G, where the Catalan research centre participates as the project’s co-technical manager. Other founding members include Intracom Telecom, Industrial Systems Institute (Athena Research Centre), Motorola Mobility, Orange Romania, OTE, Eurecom, and Fraunhofer FOKUS.
The SDG OpenOP group aims to develop a standardized, open-source platform that enables operator platform federation in next-generation 6G testbeds. As 6G evolves, ensuring interoperability, openness, and integration across telecom, cloud, and AI domains becomes critical. The OpenOP initiative addresses this need by enabling seamless exposure and sharing of network services and resources.
The platform will serve as a neutral and collaborative environment where research centres, SMEs, and telecom stakeholders can co-develop, experiment, and test innovative capabilities. It will also foster innovation across key sectors such as Industrial IoT, eHealth, automotive, and smart agriculture.
As part of its contribution, i2CAT will contribute to the development of federation management and network exposure capabilities, reinforcing its commitment to cutting-edge research in network orchestration and service provisioning.
“OpenOP marks a pivotal step forward in uniting open-source development with telecom standardisation. At i2CAT, we see this initiative as a catalyst for building interoperable, future-ready network platforms, and we’re proud to contribute our expertise to help realise the Operator Platform vision of a federated framework that enables seamless service exposure”, highlights Adriana Fernández-Fernández, Senior Researcher and Deputy Director of the Software Networks Research Group at i2CAT and co-TM of the SUNRISE-6G project.
The group’s kick-off meeting will be held 1–2 July 2025 in Torino, Italy.
i2CAT also contributes to the ETSI SDG OSM (Open Source MANO), which develops an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV specifications. OSM delivers a production-quality MANO stack that meets operators’ requirements for commercial NFV deployments. Also, between 2016 and 2019, i2CAT actively participated in the ETSI Industry Specification Groups (ISGs) by contributing key insights into the RINA projects and promoting the advances of the Network, Transport and Future Network working groups.
