Project 6G NeXt

Project description

6G NeXt aims to develop a scalable, modular and flexible infrastructure on which a variety of industrial and end-user use cases can be realized, whose requirements exceed those of today's 5G network in terms of intelligence, performance and efficiency.

One focus of the project is to build a high-performance, high-speed backbone layer that works closely with the underlying network layer via programmable interfaces. This enables compute tasks to be computed locally, in the edge cloud, or in different areas of the central cloud. Computing capacity is allocated according to requirements for latency, energy consumption, cost, among others. Ancillary services and extensions to these are integrated to optimize the cloud infrastructures in use today. In the pioneer project 6G NeXt, two particularly demanding applications with different requirements are being developed as examples:

Intelligent drones

A novel anti-collision system for aviation using the example of drones at airports with mixed air traffic. The flight paths of the aircraft are monitored in real time and collision risks are predicted using algorithms. In the event of danger, evasive maneuvers are calculated centrally and, unlike current solutions, the aircraft are also controlled via 6G. This application requires low latency, synchronization of data streams and the possibility of distributed calculation of data (split computing).

HOLOCOM (Holographic Communication)

An interactive end-to-end transmission of real-time 3D holographic video with photorealistic content and realistic 3D depth for video conferencing and monitoring/inspection of objects by drones. This application requires high bit rates upstream and downstream as well as distributed and intelligent video processing.

Project partners:

• Deutsche Telekom AG, T-Labs Spatial Computing Team.
• Fraunhofer FOKUS
• Technische Universität Berlin, Group of Mobile Cloud Computing
• Technische Universität Ilmenau, Audiovisual Technology Group (AVT)
• Wildau University of Applied Sciences, Department of Aeronautical Engineering
• Company SeeReal Technologies
• Company Volucap (Volumetric Capture)
• German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Research Area Intelligent Networks
• Company Logic Way
• Schönhagen Airfield

Network coordinator: Mandy Galkow-Schneider (T-Labs, Deutsche Telekom AG)

Project coordinator for TU Ilmenau: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alexander Raake

Project staff: William Menz M. Sc., Stephan Fremerey M.Sc.