DETERMINISTIC6G

Digitalization is transforming industries and society with the introduction of edge/cloud computing, AI, and digital twins. In the future, physical processes, collaborative machines, and novel human-system interactions will move toward a cyber-physical continuum, merging the physical world of senses, actions, and their digital programmable representations. Fundamentally new requirements for deterministic communication with predictable performance will emerge for such cyber-physical end-to-end (E2E) services.

DETERMINISTIC6G focuses on defining system aspects for E2E dependable, time-critical communication, including the design of technology enablers, and development of a validation framework through system modelling and simulations. The project takes a novel approach towards converged future infrastructures for scalable cyber-physical systems deployment where integration of stochastic elements (like wireless links and computational elements) with respect to their stochastic behavior can be captured. Therefore, system enhancements to mitigate stochastic variances in communication and computation are being developed through methods such as packet delay correction (PDC) to ensure bounded and predictable latency behavior within 6G networks.

Among other things, the project focuses on data-driven methods for latency prediction, resource allocation strategies, and extension of the legacy deterministic communication systems (TSN, DetNet) to enable them for handling stochastic characteristics of 6G wireless networks. Because E2E deterministic communication will require data offloading, and computation in a secure fashion, the project is also developing edge computing modeling to ensure deterministic operations, a security framework, and digital twinning concepts. Finally, the developed concepts will be validated through a simulation and modelling framework.

Project objectives

• Definition of deterministic services including KPIs and KVIs for 6G visionary use cases.
• Design and develop 6G features for deterministic wireless transmission and wireless-friendly enhancements for time-sensitive networking (TSN) and deterministic networking (DetNet).
• Develop AI/ML based techniques for data-driven latency characterization of 6G wireless systems.
• Develop 6G time synchronization solution to ensure E2E time awareness and new concepts for deterministic edge cloud solution.
• Conceive a security architecture for 6G deterministic communications.
• Develop a validation framework for new 6G concepts.