Background
and Scope
Learn about the project
The global reliance on technology has driven an exponential rise in energy consumption, with ICT projected to account for 21% of global electricity use by 2030. As the demand for reliable communication systems continues to grow, so does the need to ensure their environmental, economic, and social sustainability.
The UNITY-6G project aims to address energy efficiency and sustainability challenges in networked services, leveraging technologies like AI/ML, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) to secure data exchange and build trust between parties, and via different network access technologies such as Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs), Non-Public Networks (NPNs), or approaches such as Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN). The project’s focus is on developing energy-efficient, integrated network infrastructures supporting convergence and interoperability of heterogeneous domains, including wireless networking, IoT, and mobile and distributed computing.
UNITY-6G will address advanced traffic and power models, management and control strategies, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These will be used for the lifecycle management and optimization of Physical and Virtual Network Functions, the creation and dynamic reconfiguration of network instances, and balancing energy efficiency with performance.
The project will extend beyond an energy-efficient and sustainable access network, encompassing integrated network, monitoring, and management solutions, from data generation to processing, and further usage in the data engineering pipeline. It will analyse trade-offs between availability, resilience, programmability, and energy efficiency, investigating new metrics and methods for power consumption, energy efficiency, and sustainability, while benchmarking solutions based on standardized KPIs like 5GPPP ICT-52 KPIs.
UNITY-6G will take a significant step toward deploying an innovative autonomic management and orchestration framework. Leveraging distributed operations, advanced AI, and DLTs, UNITY-6G seeks to revolutionize network management. The proposed system will adopt a hierarchical structure, enabling flexible and efficient handling of network tasks while dynamically balancing centralization levels through the adaptive assignment of monitoring, analysis, and decision-making processes. This approach emphasizes a hierarchical, fault-tolerant, automated, and data-driven network management system designed with security and energy efficiency as core principles. UNITY-6G will orchestrate numerous parallel network components and significantly higher types of services via an adaptive, zero-touch methodology, setting a new benchmark for future networks.
