The projects are expected to cover at least:

• Demonstration of clear benefits with stakeholders of the considered 5G advanced/ 6G technologies and architectures in terms of innovative 6G smart networks and services addressing multiple aspects (e.g., scalability, security, and performance improvements) in line with medium to long-term diverse socio-economic scenarios.
• Special focus on targeting and achieving, by the end of the project, tangible results for environmental (e.g., optimize energy consumption, minimize CO2 emissions, etc.), societal (e.g., inclusiveness, EMF exposure, trustworthiness, privacy, technology acceptance, etc.) and economic aspects (e.g., viability for vendors, network operators and vertical service providers benefits for local economies, potential new business entrants, affordability, etc).

The Large-Scale Pilots should demonstrate the integration of different IoT/cloud/edge/computing environments (public and/or private) towards a distributed environment and dynamic resource needs with a landscape unified management able to support the emergence of a European offer and capability.

The performance and sustainability capabilities are to be assessed against a set of well-defined KVIs and KPIs. The developing set of KPIs in the international context will be taken as a basis, also those of previous projects, notably for KVIs, and potentially further extend them. Proposals should clearly indicate the target set of KPIs and KVIs and how this breaks the state of the art. Performance improvement and sustainability aspects in all domains requires definition of a benchmark against which improvements may be evaluated. Cross project collaboration is needed to define such a benchmark that will be part of the target outcome KPI repository of the SNS Partnership.

SNS LST&Ps are expected to attract the participation of vertical industries in view of stimulating a strong European participation in future downstream standardisation phases.