The UNITY-6G consortium is delighted to congratulate Javier Velázquez Martínez, R&D Engineer at Telefónica Innovación Digital and leader of key technical activities within the project, on receiving the ETSI Research & Innovation Award 2026 in the Young Researcher category.
The award was presented on 4 June 2026 during the gala dinner of the EuCNC & 6G Summit 2026 in Málaga as part of the first edition of the ETSI Research & Innovation Awards, which recognise outstanding contributions from the research community and their impact on ETSI standardisation activities.
Javier was recognised for his work on the Network Slice Controller (NSC) within the ETSI Software Development Group TeraFlowSDN, where he has played a leading role in the design, development and integration of one of the ecosystem’s most significant recent innovations. His contribution addresses a fundamental challenge facing future communication networks: how to automate the creation, management and optimisation of network slices across heterogeneous, multi-vendor and multi-domain infrastructures.
Network slicing is expected to become a core capability of 5G Advanced and 6G systems, enabling operators to provide customised connectivity services with different performance, reliability and security requirements. However, turning network slicing into an operational reality requires bridging multiple standards frameworks, technologies and administrative domains. Javier’s work directly addresses this challenge through a standards-aligned implementation that connects IETF network slice service models, 3GPP network management frameworks, and the open-source ETSI TeraFlowSDN platform.
The resulting Network Slice Controller provides a technology-agnostic framework for translating high-level slice requirements into concrete deployment and configuration actions across underlying network infrastructures. It supports the complete lifecycle of network slices—including creation, modification, monitoring, optimisation and termination—while enabling interoperability between IETF and 3GPP slicing ecosystems. The solution has been validated through deployment on SDN-based infrastructures and network emulation environments, demonstrating its applicability to real operational scenarios.
A particularly innovative aspect of the work is the integration of energy-awareness into slice orchestration decisions. By incorporating sustainability metrics such as energy consumption and efficiency into slice planning and resource allocation processes, the controller supports ETSI’s broader objectives for greener and more sustainable communication networks.
The award also recognises Javier’s efforts to strengthen collaboration between standardisation and open-source communities through the creation and coordination of the NSC Module Development Group, helping accelerate the transition from standards specifications to deployable implementations.
The work aligns closely with the objectives of UNITY-6G, where intelligent orchestration, network automation, service management and sustainability are key research themes. The Network Slice Controller represents an important step towards the project’s vision of unified, distributed, scalable and sustainability-enhanced 6G networks capable of supporting diverse services across terrestrial, non-terrestrial and edge-cloud environments.
Congratulations, Javier and Telefónica Innovación Digital, on this well-deserved recognition.
