As part of the EU’s initiative to support a multifaceted approach to addressing 6G challenges and opportunities, CEA-Leti has been selected to coordinate two projects aimed at developing first-class 6G technology capabilities and boosting standardisation efforts across Europe. The two projects were among 27 selected in a competitive proposal process by an EU partnership that allocated €130 million between the projects. “These projects represent a significant stride towards advancing smart networks and services, offering breakthrough innovations, experimental platforms, and large-scale trials, driving world-class research, and shaping the world’s digital connected future,” said the group, known as the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU).
6G-DISAC (Distributed Intelligent Sensing and Communication) and 6G-GOALS (Goal-Oriented AI-enabled Learning and Semantic Communication Networks) launched their three-year projects in January with multiple EU collaborators.
This marks the first time a single RTO or company has been chosen to coordinate two competitive EU proposals in the same initiative. CEA-Leti has coordinated several EU projects, including the recently completed RISE-6G project. That SNS JU effort developed a disruptive new concept as a service for wireless environments by dynamically controlling wireless communication for brief, energy-efficient, and high-capacity communications on various surfaces, such as walls, ceilings, mirrors, and appliances.
6G-DISAC This project will develop and innovate on a widely distributed intelligent infrastructure compatible with real-world integration constraints, new semantic and goal-oriented communication and sensing approaches, and the flexibility requirements of future 6G networks. It will apply theoretical approaches and operational and standards-compatible, distributed joint communication and sensing, by leveraging the expertise of world-leading network vendors, verticals, SMEs, research laboratories, and academic institutions spanning the value chain. Current approaches to integrated communication and sensing use centralised architectures and pass sensed information through a centralised controller.
“This project will bring the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) vision into reality, going well beyond the usual restrictive standalone or localised scenarios, by adopting a holistic perspective, with large numbers of connected users and/or passive objects to be tracked,” said Emilio Calvanese Strinati, coordinator of the project and CEA-Leti’s smart devices & telecommunications strategy programme director. “With demonstrations that validate the vital 6G-DISAC concepts, the project will revolutionise various applications, from extended reality and robot-human interaction to vehicular-safety functions and improving communication key performance indicators (KPI) with sensing-aided communications,” he explained. In addition to defining use cases and designing an innovative network architecture, the 11 6G-DISAC partners will develop novel physical-layer waveforms, distributed sensing and communications methods, optimised resource-allocation methods and protocols. Specific targets include:
- tracking connected user equipment (UE) and passive objects,
- performing ISAC with many distributed base stations, efficient distributed signal processing, and machine learning for semantic ISAC, and
- incorporating extremely large multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) technologies and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and intelligent sensing activation. “While addressing these fundamental and practical challenges, the team will focus on distributed implementation of ISAC, unlocking real sensing applications and providing a multi-perspective view of networks in space and time for tangible communication gains,” Calvanese Strinati said.
6G-GOALS This project is designed to reduce data traffic by conveying only the most relevant information and produce data-efficient, robust, and resilient protocols that can adapt to network conditions and communication objectives using modern AI/ML techniques. “As wireless mobile communication requires ever-higher data rates and 5G’s scope expands to include massive and ultra-reliable low-latency links, wireless evolution has been pressed to solve the technical problem of reliable data exchange between two endpoints,” said project coordinator Calvanese Strinati. “The 6G-GOALS project will take the wireless system design to its next stage by considering the significance, relevance, and value of the transmitted data and transforming the potential of the emerging AI/ML-based architectures into a semantic and goal-oriented communication paradigm, offering a solid step toward cooperative generative AI technologies,” he said.
Semantic communication is instrumental to induce reasoning and shared understanding among intelligent agents by exchanging pragmatically selected information in which its meaning to the receiver is designed to efficiently accomplish a goal or a task. With current approaches, data is sensed and transferred from sensors to the destinations without prior semantic extraction functions. A recent paper written by 6G-GOALS participants noted that advances in AI technologies have expanded device intelligence, fostering federation and cooperation among distributed AI agents. These advancements impose new requirements on future 6G mobile network architectures. “To meet these demands
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