Workshop 9

Empowering Transatlantic Platforms for 5G Advanced and 6G Network

Tuesday, 6 June 2023, 9:00-10:30/11:00-12:30, Room R22-R23

Organisers:

Serge Fdida (Sorbonne Université, FR)
Didier Bourse (Nokia, FR)
Alain Mourad (InterDigital, UK)
Stavroula Maglavera (InterDigital, UK)
Abhimanyu Gosain (Northeastern University, UK)

Motivation and Background

Various countries and regions have already started formal plans of government support for their research and development efforts that will define 6G. One of the primary goal of this workshop is to bring 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 separation between the network and the compute, virtualization, distribution and Cloud SaaS offer us the opportunity to define physical and digital platforms for at scale research and experimentation. This trend is going to impact the telecommunication and computer-based sectors, from design to products to operation and this is where the testbeds meet the network as a fully controllable, programmable virtualized test platform. The science of Digital Infrastructures raises multiple complex challenges to the research community that already started to explore them in the context of the forthcoming 6G. 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 and 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. Experimental platforms should be able to address the end-to-end scenario, integrating all technologies and components. Such platform will allow researcher and industry to question scientific challenges regarding the future technologies and services. They will be based on a technology roadmap that will be consolidated on the basis of the analysis of several inputs provided by the community regarding the wireless technology advances, that are pertinent to the evolution of new radio (NR) and core network (CN) until-2030. 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 H2020 5G Infrastructure PPP (2015-2023, 700 M€) and EC HEU 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 (NICT, 200M$).

Structure

This workshop main objective is to further put in contact key persons on Europe and USA to further develop collaborations and discuss possible joint activities and evolution of the wireless platforms at both sides of the Atlantic towards 5G Advanced and 6G technologies. The workshop will be mainly driven by EU ESFRI SLICES, EU 6G IA and NSF PAWR representatives.

09:00 – 09:30 Session 1: Opening

Presentation by Serge Fdida (Sorbonne University)
Presentation by Abhimanyu Gosain (Northeastern University)

09:30 – 10:30 Session 2: Presentation of the EU and US platforms

Presentation from SLICES, by Serge Fdida (Sorbonne University).
Presentation from ARA (Hongwei Zhang, Iowa State University) and AERPAW (Ismail Guvenc, NCSU) platforms – (Videos)
Presentation from SNS Phase 1 Stream C projects platforms and targeted use-cases, by Kostas Trichias (6G-IA)
Presentation from COLOSSEUM RF Digital Twin platform, by Tommaso Melodia & Abhimanu Gosain (Northeastern Univ)
Presentation from OAI by Raymond Knopp (Eurecom)

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 – 11:30 Session 3: The Networking Channel – Key lessons learnt since June 2022 and 2023+ plans

Presentation from the Networking Channel, by Stavroula Maglavera (University of Thessaly)

11:30 – 12:00 Session 4: EU and US Programmes

NSF Portfolio related to 6G and relevant test platforms, Torlak, Murat (NSF) – (Video)
Presentation from the EC SNS JU and 6G-IA including related Platforms and EU-US Cooperation, by Didier Bourse (Nokia)
Presentation from US and EU programs (tbc)

12:00 – 12:30 Round Table (30min)

Round table of representatives of EC and US Platforms. Active discussion on the future of the Platforms their expected technology evolution and potential for joint activities.
Moderator(s) :