SLICES workshop at EUCNC 2023: Empowering Transatlantic Platforms for 5G Advanced and 6G Network

Organisers

• Serge Fdida (Sorbonne Université, FR)
• Didier Bourse (Nokia, FR)
• Alain Mourad (InterDigital, UK)
• Stavroula Maglavera (UTH, GR)
• 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.

HOURLY SCHEDULE

Session 1: Opening

Session 2: Presentation of the EU and US platforms

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break

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

Session 4: EU and US Programmes

Round Table (30min)