6G Telco Cloud and Service Provision Enablers

The target 6G experimental infrastructure provides the capability to support the demonstration and operational validation of the most ambitious 6G use-case scenarios as deriving from the European 6G vision. The target experimental platform should therefore include Continuous Integration (CI) testing Continuous Development (CD) and validation capabilities at every relevant layer for the telco cloud, covering disaggregated scenarios like Open architectures, blurring the boundaries between RAN, edge and core. End-to-end virtualisation, network slicing and softwarization are key components to support multi-tenant environments, integration of private/non-public and public networks as well as multiple vertical use cases. Coverage includes the device and IoT integration and the cloud edge capabilities with scale-up capabilities for demanding services, based on a clear EU strategy for an edge integration into a complete cloud continuum, following open-source principles with a high potential to be up-taken later by European commercial telecommunication networks.

The scope includes an open, disaggregated, versatile, and unified end-to-end platform supporting the dynamic provision and management of OTT and other services, operating over multiple interconnected 6G sites in multiple European countries and following open architectures at cloud implementation level, thus delivering the highest degrees of performance, flexibility and functionality.

The target platform's demonstration/operational capabilities are to be assessed against 6G KPIs and Sustainability targets (e.g. KVIs) as defined by the SNS JU. Proposals should be flexible to accommodate new relevant KPIs as they become available from the wider 6G community and potential use cases.

To provide the required openness to host vertical use case pilots, the platforms should support open framework principles (e.g. both legal and technical like open APIs) enabling future vertical projects to access and use them. It is also strongly desirable that these facilities are built in a way that allows the evaluation of competing technologies, where appropriate. Openness is also a key requirement for “partial implementation” of demonstration capabilities. In that case, well-defined infrastructure and service interfaces will have to be defined in view of their interoperability with complementary platforms.

Innovative research across numerous technical areas including radio development for advanced networks including Radio Access Network (RAN) architectures, network orchestration models, Massive MIMO, and beyond are in scope with relevant support of state-of-the-art radio, compute, storage, and cloud resources. It includes ultra-high-bandwidth and low-latency wireless communications, with tightly coupled edge computing.

The scope of the project should include the below areas:

• Develop a Service Platform (both network services and user services) and Telco Edge Cloud, including Far Edge and Near Edge integration, leveraging and influencing Open-Source developments.
• Develop telco cloud solutions taking into consideration 6G technologies, features, and components at system or sub-system level, with clear objectives towards their adoption at standardisation and eventually at market level.
• Integrate in the telco cloud continuum 6G features and capabilities in view of supporting new 6G RAN capabilities (e.g. Hexa-X-II model) with minimum implementation options and demonstrate the validity of this evolutionary approach with minimum implementation options.
• Show the applicability of such telco cloud technologies to efficiently support advanced 6G applications and use cases not already supported by current 5G and 5G Advanced systems whilst contributing to core KVI’s, notably sustainability.
• Develop solutions and demonstrate the efficient, cloud native management of the platform and its telco applications.
• Develop solutions and demonstrate the platform capability to support AI native solutions.
• Provide 6G telco cloud solutions to deliver the required performance in an efficient and sustainable way (e.g. in terms of energy management, carbon impact).

The proposed solution should rely on existing or new open-source efforts like GSMA (e.g. Open Gateway), TIP (e.g. OpenRAN), as well as open-source projects (e.g. Sylva, Anuket, Open Nebula, CAMARA, ETSI hosted, Nephio, CNCF, LFN etc.). In addition, this work may influence existing or new open-source projects (such as the above mentioned) to ensure that the new requirements of the 6G system are supported by the relevant open-source technologies. The selected project should also provide further enhancements on network exposure and secure service distribution and digital trust. It should also provide solutions for AI-driven/supported service marketplace (catalogue of services) – standardizing a multi-stakeholder communication. In this Topic, instantiations, exposure functions, allowing exposition of available resources and required/value-added service attributes (performance, security, sustainability) related to the user applications and getting semantics of the requirements from user applications explicitly or implicitly, as well as discovery capabilities should be considered. The work is targeting to extend the capabilities of existing solutions to address 6G targets, and not simply re-use them.