The ongoing digitization of society at large, in conjunction with recent ICT trends, are continuously transforming economic and technical realities in the telecommunications landscape. This is resulting in an increase in power consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) production that is no longer acceptable .
An urgent need to reduce energy consumption, also stipulated by The European Green Deal, has brought together a consortium of 10 partners covering most typical ICT value chains. Under the project name EXIGENCE, the consortium has embarked on an ambitious journey of 30 months to verifiably improve the net energy consumption and, with it, the carbon footprint of ICT services in the context of next-generation mobile systems (6G).
Ambitions
EXIGENCE aims to conceive a system and define suitable metrics and inter-domain data exposure means for assessing end-to-end ICT service delivery. The insights from this work will be formulated as pivotal sustainability requirements and brought into authoritative standardization bodies (3GPP and ETSI) so as to shape the emerging next-generation mobile system (6G).
Overall, EXIGENCE commits to reducing the energy consumption/carbon footprint of ICT services by a factor of three for typical services (e.g., video streaming), by a factor of five for challenging services (e.g., NPN), and bringing the CO2e to zero for some realistic use cases that will be studied in the project.
All partners gathered in Lisbon earlier this year, marking the beginning of their ambitious journey of 30 months, with a total budget of almost 4M Euros. A true interdisciplinary consortium, EXIGENCE brings together several industrial partners, experienced research performing and research technology partners, from 7 EU countries. The collaboration has been off to a great start, with insights on initial use cases and orchestration principles already expected within several months.
SNS Call 2
EXIGENCE receives its funding through The European Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU), a Public-Private Partnership that aims to facilitate and develop industrial leadership in Europe in 5G and 6G networks and services. Together with projects 6G-Cloud, 6G-INTENSE, 6G-TWIN and ORIGAMI, EXIGENCE is part of Stream B: System Architecture, covering research for revolutionary technology advancements, in preparation for 6G and revolutionary advancements of IoT, devices and software. In a webinar organized by SNSJU, project coordinator Rita Campos (F6S) presented EXIGENCE activities and ambitions.
