Adlink today became the latest company to join the 5G-Drive consortium, which seeks to test and realize use cases relying on 5G technologies.

Funded by the European Commission and the Ministry of Economic Affairs of Taiwan, the 5G-Drive project has its sights set on developing two potential applications: autonomous drone scouts and industrial IoT.

Adlink, a company that applies artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge, will be leading the management and coordination of the consortium's Industry 4.0 program and will provide technical support for the associated technologies. The Industry 4.0 program envisions a future where the cloud and IoT ushers in a new industrial revolution where enterprises embrace data to automate and streamline all aspects of their operations.

Both pilot application efforts will be trialed using a 5G network with 5G New Radio (NR) equipment, a 5G network core, support for crosshaul transport, and the distribution of edge and fog computing with integrated AI.

According to Angelo Corsaro, CTO of Adlink, edge and fog computing are absolutely key to secure 5G applications that will depend on real-time data and analytics to achieve functions like AI.

He said Adlink's expertise in the edge computing space and its emphasis on open architectures and research and development made 5G-Drive an obvious choice for the company.

The edge and fog computing capabilities extend beyond the previous 3GPP initiatives by adding support for automation based on artificial intelligence and distributed data sharing and storage, Corsaro said in a statement. “The intelligent design is envisioned to achieve optimized performance, thus boosting the proven business value of 5G in each targeted vertical application.”

The pilots will run for several weeks in 5G test beds located in Europe and Taiwan and represent the culmination of two previous projects, 5G-Crosshaul and 5G-CORAL.

5G-Drive will also leverage previous research to improve the integration of 5G NR, crosshaul, and core network technologies that were developed as part of the 5G-CORAL initiative.

Adlink, the 12th member of the 5G-Drive initiative, joins the University of Carlos III of Madrid, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Ericsson, Interdigital Germany, Telefónica, Telcaria Ideas, Rise, National Chiao Tung University, Askey, and the Institute for Information Industry.

Adlink's entrance into the 5G-Drive consortium comes barely a week after the company announced it had joined forces with Intel and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to further the development of AI at the edge.

The three companies' offerings will form the basis of Adlink AI at the Edge, which aims to make it easier for customers to design and deploy machine learning (ML) models by automating edge computing processes.