Strengthening EU-US Cooperation in Experimental Infrastructures Towards 6G
Monday, 3 June 2024, 9:00-12:30, Room Gorilla Room 5
Organisers:
- Serge Fdida (Sorbonne Univ., FR)
- Abhimanyu Gosain (Northeastern Univ., US)
- Luis Pessoa (INESC TEC, PT)
- Odysseas Pyrovolakis (SNS JU,)
Motivation and Background
Various countries and regions have already initiated official programmes with government support for their research and development efforts towards 6G. One of the primary missions of this workshop is to join EU and US stakeholders from industry, government, and academia to discuss the mission and vision of test facilities, including reference design, data curation and sharing and reproducibility issues. The enabling technologies such as the convergence between the network and the compute through virtualization, load distribution, AI/ML and Cloud SaaS offer us the opportunity to design & implement large and distributed physical and digital platforms for at-scale research and experimentation. This trend is going to impact the telecommunication and computer-based sectors, from system design to products and operations, and this is where the testbeds meet the network as a fully controllable, programmable virtualized test platform. Experimentation is becoming an even more important methodology to assess and qualify the diverse design assumptions and choices in realistic conditions. It is now timely not only to strengthen existing facilities ready for 5G Advanced testing but most importantly start developing early 6G platforms as most components are software-based. This is the motivation for developing a holistic approach where all resources (compute, storage, network) are associated to continuously design, integrate, test, operate and automate the full life cycle management of applications and services. Such platforms will allow researchers and industry to question scientific challenges regarding the future technologies and services. It is important to note that initiatives exist at the international level with ambitious projects and programmes like EU ESFRI SLICES (2021-2040, 250M€), EC SNS-JU (2022-2030, 900 M€), in the US (NSF PAWR 2017-2022 100M$, NSF FABRIC 2019-2024 20M€), BRIDGES (2021-2024, 2.5M$) and China (CENI 018-2022 190M€), and efforts also developing in Japan. Joint initiatives such as the publication in January 2024 of the document “EU US Beyond 5G & 6G Roadmap” involving the ATIS Next G Alliance from the US side and 6G-IA from the EU side further reveal the commitment of these regions to collaborating in the development of 6G networks.
The successful EU EMPOWER CSA project (2018-2022) reinforced the cooperation between the EU and the US towards establishing a collaborative transatlantic community on the new connectivity frontiers beyond 5G, accelerating the joint development of the associated advanced wireless platforms. Three EMPOWER workshops were organized during EuCNC & 6GS 2019, 2022 and 2023. The collaboration between the EU and the US has been/is furthered following the contractual end of the EMPOWER project and is now currently implemented in the context of the SNS and SLICES programmes.
Structure
Opening
- Welcome by Odysseas Pyrovolakis (SNS-JU)
Session 1: Presentation of the EU platforms
Chair: Dan Kilper (Trinity College Dublin)
- Presentation from SLICES by Kostas Choumas (UTH)
- Presentation from 6G-XR by Jussi-Pekka Haapola (Oulu University)
- Presentation from CONVERGE by Luis Pessoa (INESC TEC)
- Presentation from 6G-SANDBOX by Michael Dieudonne (Keysight)
Coffee break
Session 2: EU – US Cooperation
Chair: Luis Pessoa (INESC TEC)
- Presentation from the SNS JU on related Platforms and EU-US Cooperation, by Odysseas Pyrovolakis (SNS-JU)
- Presentation from US Programme – Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) by Erwin Gianchandani (Assistant Director, NSF/TIP)
- Presentation from NTIA by Amanda Toman (Innovation Fund Director, NTIA)
- Presentation from COSMOS and PAWR, FABRIC and ACCoRD programmes by Ivan Seskar (Rutgers University)
- Presentation from 6G-XCEL by Dan Kilper (Trinity College Dublin)
Panel discussion – Future of the Platforms and opportunities for EU-US cooperation
- Moderator: Odysseas Pyrovolakis (SNS-JU)
- Panelists:
- Ivan Seskar (Rutgers University)
- Dan Kilper (Trinity College Dublin)
- Kostas Choumas (UTH)
- Josep Jornet (Northeastern University)
- Luis Pessoa (INESC TEC)
