Goals and Objectives of 6G-INTENSE
The 6G Smart Networks of the future will provide the high-performance and energy-efficient infrastructure on which next-generation internet and other future-looking applications can be developed and deployed. 6G will foster an Industry revolution and digital transformation and will accelerate the building of smart societies leading to quality-of-life improvements, facilitating autonomous systems, haptic communication, and smart healthcare. To achieve the objectives sustainably, it is well understood that new approaches are needed in the way the telecom infrastructures are architected, federated, and orchestrated. These new approaches call for multi-stakeholder ecosystems that promote synergies amongst the Mobile Network Operators and owners of all kinds of computational and networking resources that will share the extraordinary costs of yet another generation upgrade from 5G to 6G, while facilitating new business models. New architectural paradigms are making things more complex due to their large scale and diverse orchestration domains. As a result, automation needs to step up to handle this complexity. That’s why 6G is aiming for the ambitious goal of pervasive AI-driven intelligence, known as Native AI. However, the multi-stakeholder infrastructures foreseen in 6G as per the “network of networks” concept, will add a level of unprecedented management complexity due to the sheer scale and heterogeneity of the orchestration domains involved.
This is where 6G-INTENSE steps in, proposing a new System Architecture for 6G to deliver “6G as a Smart Service Execution platform”, fully in line with the vision of sustainable infrastructure sharing to reduce space and energy costs and encouraging collaboration among all members of the value chain under a unified Network-Compute fabric. A key contribution is a novel automation architecture with a Native AI toolkit facilitating intent declaration, negotiation, and decision automation across autonomous domains, termed Distributed Intent-driven Management and Orchestration (DIMO). Moreover, sensing is adopted as a key enabler, helping to navigate the complexities and lack of reliability of the Deep Edge. Sensing will come in many flavors, but one of the emerging paradigms is related to Joint Communication and Sensing (JCAS) whereby characteristics of the environment and measures are taken directly using the same signals that support communications.
ANS Research
ANS is involved in 6G-INTENSE through CNIT (Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni) together with Politecnico di Torino. Research at the UniBS ANS Lab will focus on the integration of JCAS methodologies within the Distributed Intent-driven Management and Orchestration (DIMO) architecture proposed by the project. The goals are both developing novel technologies and methodologies for JCAS and explosing the result as a Resource Intent toward the Network-Compute Fabric and hence the DIMO, allowing the matching between Tenant Intent and the actual Resource. The first goal is more visionary and foundational in nature, while the second will have a more innovation-oriented flavor exploiting technologies, like Time of Flight (ToF) and/or Angle of Arrival (AoA), which in different context and not integrated in an Intent driven architecture have already proven viable.
6G-SNS & Funding
6G-INTENSE project receives funding from the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101139266. It is thus Co-Funded by the European Union; however, views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union.