Sustainable by Design, Sustainable in Operation: The 6G Perspective
Date, hour and room to be defined
Organisers
- Mir Ghoraishi (Gigsys Solutions, )
- Christoph Schmelz (Nokia, )
Motivation and Background
Sustainability is commonly framed around three interdependent pillars: environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Future mobile networks (6G) play a dual role with respect to these pillars: they must themselves be designed and operated sustainably, while at the same time enabling sustainability gains across other sectors of society and industry. While sustainability has long been embedded in the 6G vision, recent developments have highlighted that high-level targets and static efficiency metrics alone are no longer sufficient. Instead, sustainability must increasingly be addressed as an operational property of 6G systems—engineered into their architectures, control mechanisms, and runtime decision processes.
The urgency of sustainability in 6G is driven by a convergence of political, commercial, and technological factors. Politically, sustainability remains central to European strategies, including the EU Green Deal and associated regulatory frameworks. Commercially, the rapid expansion of AI-native services, energy-intensive workloads, and large-scale cloud and edge infrastructures has fundamentally altered the energy and carbon profile of ICT, intensifying cost pressures and rebound effects. Technologically, the emergence of AI-native networks, distributed intelligence, non-terrestrial integration, and highly heterogeneous service requirements has increased system complexity, while simultaneously creating new opportunities for adaptive control, orchestration, and optimisation at runtime.
Building on the outcomes of previous discussions, this workshop focuses on operational sustainability: how sustainability objectives can be translated into concrete mechanisms, control loops, and validation processes within running 6G systems. Contributions from 12 SNS projects, supported and endorsed by SNS JU Sustainability Working Group, address complementary aspects, including semantic efficiency, energy-neutral devices, sensing-aware radio access, network digital twins, trust and assurance mechanisms, AI-native and federated orchestration, and large-scale experimentation.
This workshop is proposed as a complementary programme to the parallel workshop on Sustainability in 6G: E2E Integration and Assessment. The two workshops are designed to be mutually reinforcing rather than overlapping: while the parallel workshop addresses sustainability from an end-to-end and ecosystem integration perspective, this workshop examines how sustainability objectives are realised, enforced, and validated through concrete technical solutions in operational 6G networks. Taken together, they offer evaluators and participants a comprehensive view that spans strategic assessment and practical implementation.
Structure
Structure (Half-Day)
Welcome and Introduction to the Workshop [5 min]
• Mir Ghoraishi, Christoph Schmelz
Session 1: [90 mins]
• Presentation 1 [20 mins]
• Title: Goal-Oriented and Digital-Twin-Driven Approaches to Sustainable 6G Networks
• Presenter: Ayat Zaki Hindi (Luxemburg Institute of Science and Technology)
• Contributing Projects: 6G-GOALS, 6G-TWIN
• Short Description: Sustainability in 6G networks requires moving beyond throughput-centric optimisation towards intelligent, goal-oriented operation that jointly considers performance, energy efficiency, and application semantics. This talk presents a unified vision combining semantic-driven communications and network digital twins to enable sustainable operation of future 6G systems, particularly for safety-critical use cases. On the one hand, semantic communications reduce unnecessary sensing, transmission, and processing by focusing on task-relevant information, leveraging semantic compression, latent-space alignment, and AI-driven resource management to minimise energy and spectrum consumption while preserving task effectiveness and reliability. On the other hand, network digital twins enable the exploration of alternative network configurations that satisfy strict QoS constraints yet differ significantly in their energy impact, allowing sustainability-aware decisions to be taken without compromising safety. Using teleoperated driving as a representative safety-critical application, the talk illustrates how semantic awareness and digital-twin-based optimisation can be jointly exploited to balance latency, reliability, and energy efficiency. By shifting intelligence toward the network side while protecting battery-constrained devices, the proposed approach demonstrates how semantic communications and digital twins together can act as key enablers of sustainable, reliable, and efficient 6G networks.
• Presentation 2 [20 mins]
• Title: Multi-Layer Sustainability in 6G: From Energy-Neutral Devices to Human-Centric and TN–NTN Networks
• Presenter: Jeroen Famaey (imec)
• Contributing Projects: AMBIENT-6G, 6G-SENSES, NexaSphere
• Short Description: Achieving sustainability in 6G systems requires a holistic, multi-layer approach that spans devices, radio access, and network infrastructure, while accounting for human, environmental, and lifecycle considerations. This talk presents a unified perspective from three complementary 6G projects addressing sustainability across the full system stack. At the device level, energy-neutral Ambient-IoT concepts enable decades-long operation through ambient energy harvesting, radio-frequency wireless power transfer, and biodegradable hardware, significantly reducing battery dependence and e-waste. At the radio level, sensing-assisted and AI-driven RAN operation enables human-centric and EMF-aware beam management, dynamically balancing communication performance, safety constraints, and energy efficiency in dense deployments. At the network and system level, sustainability challenges are further addressed in complex terrestrial–non-terrestrial (TN–NTN) 6G ecosystems, where heterogeneous infrastructures, extended edge–cloud continua, and space-based components require coordinated, energy-aware design and optimisation. By combining lifecycle-aware hardware design, sensing-enabled radio intelligence, and cross-domain network optimisation, the talk highlights how sustainability can be engineered as an operational property of future 6G systems, rather than treated as an afterthought. The presented concepts and early results illustrate practical pathways toward human-friendly, energy-efficient, and environmentally responsible 6G deployments.
• Presentation 3 [20 mins]
• Title: Operational Sustainability in 6G through Trust, Orchestration, and Trustworthy AI
• Presenter: Harilaos G. Koumaras (Demokritos)
• Contributing Projects: SAFE-6G, SUSTAIN-6G, iTrust6G
• Short Description: Operational sustainability in 6G networks cannot be achieved through energy optimisation alone, but requires trust, security, and intelligence to be embedded into day-to-day network operation. This joint talk presents complementary approaches from three SNS projects—iTrust6G, SAFE-6G, and SUSTAIN-6G—showing how trustworthiness mechanisms can be transformed from static safeguards into adaptive, sustainability-enabling control loops. The contribution highlights how continuous trust assurance, combining compliance-by-design, runtime attestation, AI-driven trust inference, and post-incident forensics, enables evidence-based operational decisions that reduce over-provisioning, unnecessary redeployments, and manual intervention. Building on this, user-centric trust orchestration concepts dynamically adapt trust functions to service requirements through trust-level indicators, activating only what is strictly needed and optimising resource usage across the cloud–edge continuum. The talk further explores how trustworthy and privacy-preserving AI operations, such as federated learning over untrusted infrastructures using differential privacy and homomorphic encryption, can support social and economic sustainability by enabling collaborative intelligence without compromising trust. Together, these perspectives demonstrate how trust-aware architectures, AI-native orchestration, and secure learning mechanisms can jointly underpin resilient, efficient, and operationally sustainable 6G networks.
• Presentation 4 [20 mins]
• Title: Green Orchestration and Energy-Aware AI
• Presenter: Artur Hecker (Huawei Munich Research Centre)
• Contributing Projects: EXIGENCE, NATWORK, ECO-eNET
• Short Description: The rapid transition of ICT towards AI-native operation is fundamentally reshaping the sustainability landscape of future 6G systems. While AI has long been seen as an enabler of decarbonisation through digitalisation, the proliferation of large-scale AI workloads, distributed training, and inference services now poses significant challenges in terms of energy consumption and carbon footprint. This joint talk brings together complementary perspectives from the EXIGENCE and NATWORK projects to address these challenges through coordinated, system-level approaches to sustainable operation. The contribution explores how green orchestration can align AI workload placement, partitioning, and execution with real-time energy conditions, network capabilities, and service constraints, enabling adaptive and carbon-aware operation across training and inference phases. Building on this, incentive mechanisms are introduced as AI-native tools to align individual user and stakeholder decisions with system-wide sustainability objectives, balancing performance, quality of experience, and environmental impact. At the system level, the talk highlights the need for federated orchestration across autonomous domains and stakeholders, enabling sustainable service delivery through interoperable data exchange, adaptive coordination, and cross-domain decision making. By combining green orchestration, incentive-driven optimisation, and federated coordination mechanisms, the joint contribution illustrates how AI-native 6G systems can move towards truly operationally sustainable architectures that scale across heterogeneous infrastructures and organisational boundaries.
• Coffee Break [10 min]
• Session 2: [90 mins]
• Keynote [25 mins]
• For the Long Run: Telecom in a Changing Ecosystem
• by Prof Rui Aguiar (Institute Telecommunication Aveiro)
• Short Description: Operational sustainability is emerging as a critical challenge for telecom operators in the transition towards 6G. The ability to operate, manage, and evolve networks and services over long time horizons—within an increasingly heterogeneous, software-driven, and multi-stakeholder ecosystem—while maintaining controlled operational costs and high resilience, is becoming a key determinant of competitiveness. In addition to the pressing requirements for energy efficiency and environmental impact reduction, operators must address the growing complexity of networked systems and the need to rapidly adapt to, and effectively monetise, new services and vertical use cases. This talk will explore operational sustainability from multiple viewpoints, emphasising the pressures and opportunities introduced by network softwarisation, cloud-native architectures, and increased automation.
• Presentation 5 [20 mins]
• Title: From Testbeds to Impact: Assessing Operational Sustainability in 6G Networks [20 mins]
• Presenter: Luis Cordeiro (One Source)
• Contributing Projects: 6G-PATH, 6G-VERSUS
• Short Description: Validating operational sustainability in 6G networks requires moving beyond architectural concepts towards large-scale, real-world experimentation across diverse use cases and verticals. This joint talk presents complementary perspectives from the 6G-PATH and 6G-VERSUS projects, both of which leverage pan-European testbeds, trials, and pilots to assess how sustainability can be engineered, measured, and validated in practice. The contribution highlights how structured experimentation methodologies—covering KPI and KVI definition, testbed preparation, platform integration, deployment, and iterative validation—enable systematic assessment of network performance, reliability, and long-term operational sustainability under realistic traffic loads and mobility conditions. Across multiple verticals, including smart cities, health, farming, energy, and environmental management, the pilots evaluate advanced 6G capabilities such as network slicing, edge–cloud integration, AI-assisted network management, multi-backhaul connectivity, and heterogeneous service support. A particular focus is placed on sustainability assessment frameworks that connect high-level societal goals with pilot- and use-case-specific indicators, capturing not only why a solution is sustainable, but also how it is designed and operated, and where and when sustainability impacts arise. By combining large-scale validation infrastructures with multi-layer sustainability evaluation, the joint contribution demonstrates how trials and pilots can act as essential instruments for translating sustainability principles into operationally viable and measurable 6G network solutions.
• Panel Discussion [45 mins]
• Beyond Greenwashing: What Does Sustainable 6G Really Mean?
• Panelists:
- Prof Rui Aguiar (Institute Telecommunication Aveiro)
- Prof Maziar Nekovee (University of Sussex)
- Dr Anastasias Gavras (Eurescom)
- Dr Katerina Peterson (PSC Europe)
- Chiara Mazzone (SNS) – TBC
- Dr Christophe Schmelz (Nokia)
• Moderator:
- Dr Mir Ghoraishi (Gigasys Solutions)
• Structure:
- Opening talk by Chiara Mazzone (SNS) [10 mins]
- Position statements [10 mins]
- Discussions and Q/A [25 mins]
