COPERNICO

Objectives

O1: To design and develop an integrated system for optical sensing, as well as a system for distributed collection and processing of telemetry and sensing data

This objective consists of two sub-objectives. On the one hand, to deploy the integrated optical sensing and communications system that will allow increasing the amount and heterogeneity of collected data. On the other hand, it also covers the design, implementation, and assessment of the AQUILA DTAS system. Local telemetry for devices and systems, including quantum, optical, and packet will be explored. AI/ML techniques for dimensionality reduction, feature extraction, and data compression will be studied. Intelligence at the centralized system will exploit correlation and pattern recognition among heterogeneous data pipelines. Procedures for tuning the granularity and frequency of data collection and processing for both integrated optical sensing system and DTAS will be provided.

O2: To design and develop a multilayer digital twin with multifaceted knowledge of the infrastructure

This objective will focus on the design, implementation, and assessment of LIBRA NDT, that will integrate the technologies and functionalities from three digital twins, i.e., DARIUS QDT for the quantum domain, OCATA NDT for the optical domain, and CURSA-SQ NDT for the packet layers. LIBRA will cover heterogeneous network segments including access PON, and metro/core multilayer packet-optical networks. Methods and algorithms for predictive and intelligent network operation will be developed to guarantee e2e network resilience. LIBRA will rely on the large amount of data available from telemetry and sensing to create models and produce reusable and explainable datasets, post-collection techniques will be produced.

O3: To design and develop an intelligent and secure distributed control for near-real time operation of connectivity services

This objective will focus on the design, implementation, and assessment of HYDRA IDC. The system will consist in a centralized intelligence running besides the network orchestrator and a local intelligent control running in each of the network sites. The centralized intelligence is in charge of the secure deployment and supervision of individual per-service sIDC systems, while local intelligent control includes a set of connectivity service intelligent agents, being each one part of a different sIDC system. Each agent collects telemetry data from the local telemetry and sensing agent, processes them and consumes the data directly or sends the data to a remote agent in the same sIDC system for AI-based decision making.

O4: To design and develop defense-in-depth mechanisms for protecting COPERNICO system and components

This objective tackles the different and heterogeneous measures to provide protection to the entire COPERNICO solution and its components. Optical sensing for security purposes will be considered as a key security pillar. Methods for integrity and authentication of sensing, telemetry and events collected and stored will be developed. Attestation of telemetry and service agents will be required to increase trustworthiness of the different systems. Robust AI models and secure data processing algorithms will be designed against AI-based attacks such as evasion, poisoning, and model disclosure. Encrypted communications between systems and agents will be considered.

O5: To integrate components and to build PoC demonstrators validating the main principles of COPERNICO to influence network operators to adopt it

The project will integrate the innovations targeted in the previous objectives and build a PoC designed to show the COPERNICO system. In addition, COPERNICO will disclose the approach, concepts, design methodologies, architectures, and performance results to a wide range of relevant stakeholders by means of communication, dissemination, standardization, and exploitation activities, while emphasizing openness and transparency.