The telecom industry is standing on the edge of a new era, with 6G technology promising to reshape how we connect and innovate. Imagine a future where seamless connectivity powers everything from self-driving cars to virtual worlds — but to get there, we need a better way to collaborate and innovate as an industry.
That’s where the JOINER project comes in –the UK’s first national accelerator programme for 6G and beyond– designed to bring together researchers, businesses, and government to tackle the big challenges in telecom. By breaking down silos and creating a shared platform, JOINER makes it easier for everyone to work together, share resources, and turn bold ideas into real solutions.
A key feature of JOINER is Hypervisor as a Service (HaaS), based on Weaver Labs’ Cell-Stack software. This capability adds a key layer of cloud automation to streamline the use of complex Telco-Cloud platforms (like Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Openshift), allowing platform users to deploy and manage them with zero-touch. This level of automation allows researchers to focus on driving innovation without getting bogged down by the technical challenges of deploying, configuring and managing the underlying cloud systems to host their applications. By removing the complexity of cloud infrastructure creation and management, HaaS enables seamless experimentation and collaboration, accelerating the development of new technologies.
JOINER, led by the University of Bristol, is a national platform that connects academic institutions, research labs, and industry to drive innovation in telecom technologies such as 6G.
As a national platform, JOINER plays a crucial role in centralising resources, accelerating innovation, and ensuring the efficient use of R&D investments. By uniting fragmented testbeds and infrastructure, it creates a shared space for large-scale collaboration, helping position the UK as a global leader in telecom.
Its distributed approach is central to this vision. By linking multiple sites across the UK through a dedicated network and a multi-tenancy cloud platform, JOINER ensures scalability, resilience, and seamless collaboration. This design fosters innovation across diverse environments, enabling the development of robust, scalable solutions that meet the demands of next-generation technologies.
Hypervisor as a Service (HaaS) is a cloud-based automation service that allows researchers to deploy, manage and run virtual machines and containers on-demand without the complexities of handling physical hardware or hypervisor software, all of that complexity is handled by Cell-Stack. Through the JOINER platform, experimenters gain full control over their virtualised environments, enabling scalable, flexible, and efficient experimentation for a wide range of use cases.
JOINER’s HaaS solution integrates with physical resources, providing isolated, multi-tenant environments for running complex experiments while ensuring the scalability and security required for next-generation technologies. By offering both physical and virtual resource allocation, JOINER HaaS facilitates seamless integration and orchestration of large-scale experiments.
At the core of JOINER’s HaaS is Weaver Labs’ Cell-Stack. Cell-Stack automates the deployment of physical (bare-metal), container and virtual infrastructures while orchestrating applications and managing the underlying resources. Through the integration of Cell-Stack agents, JOINER automates the provisioning of bare-metal, container and virtual platforms ensuring that servers are ready for use with minimal setup. This tight integration enables JOINER’s platform users to deploy, modify, and manage containers and VMs effortlessly, as Cell-Stack coordinates network, compute and storage resources, handles deployment automation, and maintains multi-tenancy policies for each project.
Through this advanced orchestration and resource management, Cell-Stack enables JOINER’s HaaS to provide researchers with a flexible, on-demand environment to experiment with virtualisation and high-performance computing, all while maintaining system security and integrity.
With Weaver Labs’ Cell-Stack, JOINER HaaS transforms how researchers and industry players collaborate, providing the tools and flexibility needed to pioneer the next generation of telecom technologies.
JOINER’s mission is to:
In conclusion, JOINER, with its HaaS capability powered by Cell-Stack, is more than a research initiative — it’s a blueprint for the future of the Telco Cloud powered by automation. By enabling collaboration and experimentation on a national scale, JOINER is paving the way for 6G and beyond. With its ambitious goals and innovative approach, JOINER, with the support of Weaver Labs, positions the UK as a leader in connectivity, shaping a smarter, more connected world.
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