On December 4, 2025, UNITY-6G project partner imec hosted and actively participated in the Wireless Community work meeting held in Leuven, Belgium. The workshop, themed “Reliable Communication and Intelligent Sensing for Dynamic Environments”, brought together over a hundred experts, professionals, and academics from the local industry in Flanders and beyond to explore technologies driving the future of industrial automation and Industry 4.0.
During the event, imec featured prominently in both the technical program and the live demonstration sessions. A key highlight was the presentation and demonstration delivered by researchers from imec-IDLab, focusing on their cutting-edge wireless Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) research infrastructure enabled by openwifi.
The presentation directly aligned with UNITY-6G’s core mission, promoting the project’s key enablers for ultra-reliable, deterministic, and low-latency communication in highly dynamic environments. In industrial settings—where dense metallic structures, moving inventory, and mobile robots create harsh radio environments—achieving “better-than-wired” wireless connectivity is paramount. By showcasing this advanced open-source architecture, imec demonstrated how future 6G networks can achieve the bounded latency and near-perfect availability required for time-critical applications like closed-loop control and cooperative robotics.
The workshop also featured an opening introduction by Kris Hermus, Coordinator of the Wireless Community and Innovation Program Manager at imec, alongside diverse sessions covering artificial intelligence for wireless environment awareness, interference detection, and visible light communication (VLC).
By sharing these insights and open research infrastructures with a broad audience of stakeholders, imec and the UNITY-6G consortium continue to bridge the gap between academic innovation and industrial application, reinforcing Europe’s path toward resilient, next-generation wireless ecosystems.
