ExpectedOutcome:
- Technologies for basic building blocks that go beyond the current 5G wireless system specifications, supporting improved wireless communications’ efficiency and capabilities in increasingly dense environments and number of end-devices.
- Support for a multitude of services, including further advancements on enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTC), Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency communication (URLLC), Vehicle-to-everything (V2X), etc., with significantly more stringent requirements, such as multi-Gbps data throughput, high reliability, and security, as well as high degrees of adaptability, while addressing energy efficiency.
- Identification of technologies, best practices, methods, and tools, for maximising performance vs energy consumption, addressing societal questions, such as EMF impact and urban impact of antennas, especially for city dense environments.
- Support to direct impact in standardization.
Objective:
Please refer to the "Specific Challenges and Objectives" section for Stream A in the Work Programme, available under ‘Topic Conditions and Documents - Additional Documents’.
Scope:
- Signal processing techniques and technologies for evolved Radio Access Network (RAN) systems, also considering the end-devices, operating on relevant frequency ranges (i.e., frequencies both below 6GHz and above 26GHz) and possibly incorporating novel AI/ML techniques where relevant.
- Design and evaluation of advanced solutions focused on the physical layer. Impacts on changes to the higher layers of the RAN system is in scope as well as the impact of current trends (such as cell-free and software-based radio systems, etc.) and of architectural solutions where higher layer protocols are disaggregated and implemented in appropriate (edge) cloud-based solutions. Similarly, the usage of microelectronics technology (e.g., in the domain of hardware acceleration) is also in scope.
- Spectrum re-farming, improvements on millimetre wave technologies including massive and ultra-massive MIMO, unified air interfaces, and continuing improvements on technologies for massive connections (such as random multiple access, broadcast/multicast architectures, and cell free networks). Focus should be on technologies able to smoothly enable and evolve existing systems towards improved energy efficiency, considering aspects such as full-duplex, AI/ML techniques and advanced wireless edge caching.
All the above-mentioned topics should also relate their results in tangible gains on minimizing the required energy for the network operation.
The above topics listed in the scope represent the core focus of SNS-2022-STREAM-A-01-01, without precluding the potential inclusion of other related technologies still contributing to the listed Expected Outcomes.
