Ericsson collaborates with Telcaria, a Spanish SME specialized in the research and development of new telecommunication solutions and official collaborator of 5TONIC, for identifying innovative solutions for enhancing energy efficiency of end-to-end vertical applications relying on 5G Advanced technologies.

The collaboration has been forged in the context of 6G-DAWN project coordinated by CTTC, a research and innovation project running since 2022 until end of 2024, being funded by the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan of the Spanish Government via the UNICO 6G I+D programme.

Ericsson and Telcaria are jointly researching novel mechanisms for evaluating, recommending, and enforcing alternative configurations of that may enhance energy efficiency indicators for Private 5G Advanced Networks. The intent of this initiative is, on the one hand, securing the minimum energy consumption levels of 5G Private Networks without impacting other network performance parameters, and, on the other hand, assessing and optimizing network energy consumption for delivering traffic at speeds up to 1 Gbps over 5G mid-range bands.

The strategy followed entails adopting a PNI-NPN (Public-Network Integrated Non-Public Networks) approach for offloading and reducing the energy consumption of the Control Plane, and improving the predictability of both network performance and end-user service patterns in the actual field for further reducing the energy consumption of the RAN.

The exposure of energy-consumption information can help CSPs and Enterprises in understanding where and when energy is consumed, and which factors are influencing this consumption. This, together with the inclusion of enhanced mechanisms to optimize the network configuration, both statically and dynamically, can help companies operating and leveraging private cellular networks in manufacturing, logistics and transportation industries, among others, to reduce their operational expenses and their carbon footprint.

For enabling the experimentation and validation activities in this context advanced technologies like Network Digital Twin and Network Exposure have been integrated at 5TONIC lab, and a Private 5G Advanced Network system has been deployed at the EXTREME Testbed of CTTC.

Maria Felisa Sedano, CEO at Telcaria, adds: "This collaboration represents a great opportunity for us to explore new challenges in energy efficiency within the future of cellular networks, ultimately unlocking new possibilities and strengthening our cooperation with Ericsson."

“Ericsson and Telcaria are opening new avenues for enhancing 5G network energy efficiency, enabled by the application of instrumental technologies such as PNI-NPN, Network Digital Twin and Exposure for Private Network capabilities.” - indicates Manuel Lorenzo, Head of Technology & Innovation at Ericsson Spain.  

6G DAWN team joined at CTTC for a productive F2F meeting during 14-15 March 2023.

6G DAWN was present at MWC24 in CTTC and TELECO RENTA booths.

The expected growth and scale of 6G networks shall demand crafting new and smarter network management paradigms. Multiple stakeholders will jointly define the ecosystem, and this poses several administrative and technical challenges. Natively embedding AI-based cycles while delegating decisions throughout the network offers the required resilience and sustainability at scale. A consortium of four industrial partners (ERICSSON Spain, EVIDEN, Software Radio Systems and Telcaria) representing the 5G and beyond value chain and led by the CTTC (Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya) are investigating these challenges within the framework of the UNICO R+D project 6G DAWN.

6G DAWN is a 2.6M€ research and innovation project funded by the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan of the Spanish Government via the UNICO I+D programme, which fosters the creation of a Spanish industry-academia 6G ecosystem.

6G DAWN proposes a zero-touch distributed 6G network management plane to handle the deployment of a massive number of network slices (virtual networks built over the same shared physical infrastructure) covering all network segments (i.e., RAN, Transport, Core, Cloud, Extreme Edge). The main challenges are elasticity (the capacity to adapt to varying demands and network conditions to improve the energy efficiency and sustainability of the network) and resilience (guaranteeing secure and continuous operation among the multiple stakeholders). Furthermore, given the increasing scale, automated energy-aware decision-making appears as a transversal component of any sustainable 6G network. In this respect, AI is natively embedded in the architecture at the various decision levels by enabling the support of techniques such as federated learning, graph neural networks, and explainable AI, which are coordinated towards a global network-wide goal. Provided these essential characteristics, 6G networks will be well-equipped to address a wide range of vertical requirements, enabling them to become the foundational infrastructure for diverse industries, including automotive, industry 4.0, extended reality (XR), energy, eHealth, and emergency response systems, hence will become the backbone of society.

Multiple proof-of-concepts (PoCs) are being built to experimentally validate the potential of such an AI-native decentralized management architecture in a variety of close-to-real scenarios. This includes dynamically adjusting radio access network (RAN) parameters in open RANs, energy optimization of non-public networks (NPN), the integration of the extreme edge in the network management framework, intrusion detection and mitigation, and QoS and network resiliency optimization. The PoCs are deployed having the EXTREME Testbed® of the CTTC as a central experiment-as-a-service facility, with some of the components distributed in labs of the industrial partners.

6G DAWN plenary face to face meeting took place at CTTC premises in Castelldefels. Project architecture, use cases and proof of concepts were discussed.

Last 11^th October 2023 was held at CTTC  a SRS Workshop, that aimed to  provide a general overview of the srsRAN Project by SRS, its architecture and main features, and its applications, as well as to guide new users through the building/installation process and all the steps required for a successful UE (either virtual or COTS) attachment. 

6G DAWN partners celebrated a first face to face meeting during 17-18 May, hosted by CTTC in Castelldefels.