6G Holistic System

6G networks should take into consideration societal requirements as well as technological improvements. For that purpose, the project should equally address both aspects with the ambition to cover the duality of the European approach: “Sustainable 6G” and “6G for sustainability”. The overall goal is to Identify the technology needed to provide value to the society, being environmentally and economically sustainable.

The project should equally address both of the following aspects:

• The consolidation of 6G societal and technical requirements, KVI’s and KPI’s, to serve 6G use cases and the associated architectural and technological avenues to realise them. It consolidates results of other technological strands and provides comparative assessments of the various solutions, pushing the limits if technology and building a generic 6G toolbox with trade-offs across topics that will be investigated by more than one project (e.g. minimization of the energy consumption, coordination of AI/ML solutions in deployed in different network domains).
• The Societal focus and technologies to address societal goals is an important aspect. A widely validated approach should be developed to transform key SDG requirements into technological solutions and performance objectives.

The work also identifies key technologies to convey towards standardization with common approaches with users, towards the realization of a consensus framework including verticals from the onset. It is expected to be supported by the key 6G players of Europe across the value chain, including development of components and the needs of vertical industries, spanning industry to academia. This provides the view of a European technological solution for the consolidation of a 6G vision, objectives and technological developments leading to strong European position at standardization level, and paving the way towards future deployment.

The project is planned to start concurrently with other Stream B RIAs as several activities are needed before integrating the results and key findings of SNS Phase 1 Stream B projects. These activities indicatively include the definition of an appropriate set of 6G use cases, KVIs and KPIs incorporating the analysis of key findings from pre-6G technologies (5G PPP and other topic related initiatives). This should include the setup and work on key topics that the stakeholders of the project will identify as important for 6G networks and that may not even be included in other Stream B Strands, etc.