Enable-6G project launched
April 24, 2023
By Colin Mann
The IMDEA Networks Institute, in collaboration with Telefónica, NEC Corporation and BluSpecs, has launched the ENABLE-6G project, which aims to address the challenges that will be faced by future 6G networks, such as increased connectivity, higher performance demands, and advanced object and environment detection and communication. This project is funded by the European Union-NextGenerationEU and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, in the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR).
As 5G technology continues to be the driving force behind edge computing and autonomous vehicles, researchers and industry experts are already looking towards the future and the development of 6G technology. With challenges in capacity, energy efficiency, latency, and data security and privacy, the development of the ENABLE-6G project has become crucial, suggests Telefónica.
According to Telefónica, it is necessary for 6G networks to become more adaptable and intelligent to enable the realisation of a future vision that will contend with greater levels of complexity, contextualisation, and data traffic while consuming less energy and offering stronger security and privacy measures. Such advancements are crucial to instil the necessary level of trust required for widespread implementation of next-generation devices and nodes.
One of the main objectives is to ensure advanced privacy protections are built into the architecture, as precise mapping and sensing, data privacy and security have become major concerns, and has also become a major benefit for new use cases. Another strategic objective is the design and implementation of software-defined networks that can operationalise optimised edge-to-cloud processing to facilitate time-critical and geo-distributed network orchestration (e.g., via the application of control-task algorithms). The ENABLE-6G project represents a major step forward in the new technologies into 6G to improve wireless communications, provide environmental sensing and significantly reduce the energy footprint per device to avoid a large overall increase in network power consumption. “We are excited about the potential impact of this project and look forward to collaborating with our partners to bring it to fruition,” says Telefónica.