The University of Bristol and partners including Digital Catapult have been granted nearly £12 million from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, to develop and industrialise technologies and solutions for future 6G mobile networks.
The project, Realising Enabling Architectures and Solutions for Open Networks (REASON) brings together an ecosystem representing the entire telecommunication R&D supply chain, including three major mobile network equipment vendors, Ericsson, Samsung and Nokia.
REASON will develop a roadmap for open 6G networks, which will set the framework for new developments across the entire technology stack. The project will provide novel solutions to effectively integrate multi-technology access networks and to advance their performance in line with the emerging 6G KPIs. New concepts will be proposed to support unprecedented network densification. Smart technologies will be developed that aim to use multi-technology access networks to extract sensing information and support 6G use cases.
In addition, advanced solutions for network-edge and network-wide automation will be developed leveraging state-of-the art artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. REASON aims to provide end-to-end service optimisation through cognitive orchestration tools to enable edge-to-edge and domain-domain functionalities for a wide range of use cases.