Bridging WebAssembly, Cloud-Native Execution, and 6G Edge Systems: From Research to Industry Practice
Date, hour and room to be defined
Organisers
- Merlijn Sebrechts (Imec & Ghent Univ., BE)
Motivation and Background
WebAssembly (Wasm) is emerging as a key execution technology for cloud-native, edge, and next-generation (6G) systems. Its strong isolation guarantees, portability across heterogeneous platforms, and low execution overhead make it well suited for secure service orchestration, serverless computing, and edge intelligence in future networked environments.
At the same time, innovation in WebAssembly is largely driven by industry-led ecosystems and open-source communities, while a smaller but growing academic community investigates fundamental aspects such as performance, security, orchestration, and integration with edge and 6G infrastructures. Interaction between these communities remains limited, despite their shared interests and complementary expertise.
The EUCNC & 6G Summit provides a unique venue where researchers, system architects, and industry practitioners working on future networked systems naturally converge. Recent dissemination activities within European research projects have shown strong interest in WebAssembly-based approaches for cloud-edge computing, security, and orchestration.
This workshop aims to provide a focused forum that brings together academic and industrial perspectives on WebAssembly and cloud-native execution for 6G and edge systems. By enabling the presentation of peer-reviewed research contributions alongside invited industrial experiences, the workshop will foster knowledge exchange, highlight open research challenges, and stimulate collaboration. The topic is timely, aligns strongly with EUCNC themes, and addresses an emerging area of high relevance for future network architectures.
The workshop is supported by members of the Bytecode Alliance, providing a concrete bridge between academic research and the industrial WebAssembly ecosystem.
Structure
The workshop will be organised as a half-day event (two conference time slots of 1h30) and will be held on the first day of the conference (June 2nd, 2026).
The workshop programme will include:
- Scientific technical sessions with peer-reviewed workshop contributions, organised into thematic sessions related to WebAssembly, cloud-native execution, edge computing, and 6G systems.
- Invited talks from industry and ecosystem experts, focusing on real-world deployments, architectures, and lessons learned. Potential candidates are
-Ralph Squillace (PM for Azure at Microsoft)
-Dhouha Ayed (Senior researcher at Thales)
-Chris Woods (Senior Key Expert at Siemens)
-Petri Laari (Senior Researcher at Ericsson)
-Radu Matei (Chief Product Architect at Akamai) - One invited keynote talk from a recognised expert in the field. Potential candidate is
-Bailey Hayes (CTO at Cosmonic and director of the Bytecode alliance)
The involvement of the Bytecode Alliance will support the identification of high-impact speakers and ensure strong representation from real-world WebAssembly deployments. - A panel discussion bringing together academic and industrial speakers to discuss research challenges, standardisation aspects, and future directions.
Workshop contributions may take the form of presentations, extended abstracts (2 pages), or full papers (up to 5 pages), all reviewed by the Workshop Technical Programme Committee. All workshop contents, including authors and presenters, will be defined by the workshop organisers.
Authors of selected accepted workshop papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their contributions to a planned journal special issue. These extended submissions will undergo an independent peer-review process, in accordance with the policies of the selected journal.
