As represented in letters used in the previous figure:

1. Lay the foundations for a NI-native B5G architecture.
2. Devise innovative approaches for the design of a NI that responds to the specific needs of networking tasks.
3. Leverage on current approaches to develop new NI algorithms that support eight critical and innovative B5G functionalities, which, once embedded in the project NI-native architecture, allow meeting the different key performance indicators.
4. Demonstrate the advantages of the new NI design and integration through extensive validation.
5. Encompass all measures adopted to ensure impact.

Elaborating evaluation (D), DAEMON uses a comprehensive validation methodology, based on two complementary approaches:

• Real-world experiments: it will showcase how NI-driven zero-touch network management can yield substantial performance gains and savings in resource usage efficiency or energy consumption, with credible proofs-of-concept in realistic but controlled environments.
• Data-driven evaluations: its partners will have access to substantial volumes of mobile traffic data, which is paramount to the proper training of the NI algorithms, and ensures that such algorithms will be trained and tested in realistic conditions. DAEMON will also feed the measurement data to digital-twins implemented into simulation and emulation sandboxes.

The DAEMON validation methodology includes evaluations that use either the experimental sites or measurement datasets. The project real-world experimental validations will be carried out in the four sites:

1. Radio: This site, located in Dublin, Ireland, comprises a medium-scale testbed with a large number of software-defined radios, as well as computing infrastructure to host baseband units and additional radio monitoring equipment.
2. Orchestration: This is a multi-location evaluation site, with computing and networking infrastructure geographically distributed across three physical locations in Spain, Belgium and Greece, interconnected through tunneling technologies. The goal is to provide a testbed with distributed computing fabric to experiment with management and orchestration platforms and algorithms.
3. Management: This site is in Spain, and has (i) experimental platforms for virtualized core and radio emulation, and (ii) a production platform – in collaboration with Telefonica Business Solutions operations– to study interconnection models of mobile operators worldwide.
4. Edge: This site, located across 30 Km of highway in Belgium, consists of 8 Road-Side Units (RSUs) and one V2X-capable vehicle, to test NI at the network edge of a real high-mobility scenario.

The validation of NI solutions at scale requires large amounts of data to train and validate the learning algorithms. However, too often in the literature AI solutions are evaluated in non-realistic data setups that include simplistic traffic generated from random distributions. Instead, DAEMON takes a strong data-driven approach for NI evaluation that ensures the credibility of the results. The data-driven approach will build on two large-scale datasets:

1. Through the TID partner, DAEMON will be granted access to measurement data collected in the UK within the operational of O2, a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) with more than 25% market share in that country. The available datasets comprise hundreds of network KPIs for every cell site and radio sector, as well as exhaustive mobile core signaling logs and KPIs, gathered on demand.
2. The OTE partner is the leading mobile network operator in Greece, with close to 50% of the total customers in the country. The participation of OTE in the project will grant access to nationwide datasets of network KPIs such as per-cell served users, traffic, throughput, latency, or jitter.