Anastasius Gavras has more than 25 years of professional experience in academic and industry research. He joined Eurescom, the leading organisation for managing collaborative R&D in telecommunications, as programme manager, focusing on the areas of management of networks & systems, security and middleware. His interests are large scale testbeds for future network experimentation. He is interested in innovation on top of network infrastructures and the evolution of networks in general. He is a steering board member of the 5G PPP and acting in several work groups (e.g. Network Management and QoS, Architecture, Vision, Trials and Experimentation). He is involved in the co-ordination of several 5G related projects (5G-VINNI, 5GINFIRE, SELFNET, SLICENET). He is author or co-author of several papers and articles in the area.

The 5G network infrastructure is a tremendous opportunity because it presents one network concept for all requirements. It focuses on vertical industry requirements and at the same time consolidates the related technical areas, such as Cloud and Edge Computing, Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualisation and others. Through adoption of current standards and the use of common architectural components and APIs we can build and operate experimental facilities that are as close as never before to the future deployed networks. The European 5G-PPP has started a number of 5G infrastructure projects, which are aligned with the overall 5G Pan-European trial roadmap and plan to offer services to vertical sector stakeholders including business relationship assumptions, exemplifying a contemplated added value for the customer, beyond verifying correct system functionality and key performance indicators.