From 25–27 November 2024 in Belgrade, Serbia, the IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (IEEE CSCN 2024) promises to deliver a rich technical program focused on shaping the future of mobile communications systems.
EXIGENCE is excited to contribute to this prestigious event by presenting our paper during the Technical Session on Research Projects. On another note, Artur Hecker from Huawei, a valued partner of EXIGENCE, will actively participate in a panel discussion emphasizing on our commitment to 6G innovation and sustainability. He will also take the stage as a keynote speaker, sharing insights into the EXIGENCE project, goals towards energy consumption and CO2 emission reduction, and highlighting our commitment to innovation and sustainability in mobile telecommunications.
More details on our participation below:
TS5 Technical Session 1 on Research Projects
Tuesday, November 26, 2024 | 12:00 PM – 13:30 PM | Room 35
Chair: Mosab Hamdan (Walton Institute, South East Technological University, Ireland)
Paper Title and authors: Standardization Roadmap towards Sustainable 6G: Sripriya Srikant Adhatarao and Zoran Despotovic (Huawei Technologies, Germany); Ljupco Jorguseski and Ewout Brandsma (TNO, The Netherlands); Daniel Corujo (University of Aveiro & Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal); Artur Hecker (Huawei, Germany)
P3: Operational Sustainability of 6G Systems
Tuesday, November 26 | 14:30 PM – 16:00 PM | Room: 32
Moderator: Artur Hecker, Huawei Technologies, Munich Research Center, Germany
Panelists:
- Artur Hecker, Huawei Technologies. (Moderator)
- Alain Mourad, Head of Wireless Lab Europe at InterDigital
- Chiara Lombardo, Researcher at CNIT & University of Genoa
- Mir Ghoraishi, CEO at Gigasys Solutions
Background and Motivation: At the brink of the 6G technology development and standardization, this panel aims to explore the design space for improved operational sustainability of the future mobile telecommunications systems. Historically, most efforts focused on reducing the energy consumed by user devices and on the energy budgets of the air interface. With 5G, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has made significant progress in developing network energy-saving technologies beyond the air interface. The selected panelists will shed some light on these recent developments, commenting on the areas with the highest saving potentials and the current technology development status. However, in light of the ongoing societal sensibilization to the sustainability topic, the next generation, 6G, will have to cope with the well-known rebound effects, striving for energy consumption limitation in spite of the expected increase in the system load. Such approaches will have to go beyond the classical energy efficiency and optimization methods. The panel will discuss 6G-suitable approaches in this space and identify interesting new opportunities for inter-disciplinary research.
Wednesday, November 27 | 09:00 ΑΜ – 10:00 ΑΜ | Room: 32
Keynote Speaker: Artur Hecker – Advanced Wireless Technology Laboratory of Huawei Munich Research Center, Germany
Abstract: Facing the climate change, legislations all around the world seek to control carbon dioxide emissions, e.g., by measuring and introducing limits on the allowed carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) production. Often implemented in a form a cap-and-trade carbon market, this usually leads to wide-spread decarbonization measures. Oddly enough, decarbonization translates in a higher usage of ICT, while most major MNOs have promised net zero operations by 2040. This puts state-of-the-art resource optimization methodologies at their limits, and it remains overall doubtful that these targets can be achieved under the expected increase of the load.
Therefore, sustainability of network infrastructures recently came into the focus of the R&D community. While previous generations were mainly looking at energy efficiency of the air interface, 5G now expands the scope to the whole system, and 6G is even believed to become the first generation of mobile systems with “sustainability by design”. The problem at hand is multi-faceted and requires competences from several domains, rarely available, which is why it is important to identify and pinpoint individual, promising areas, which can lead to an improvement without jeopardizing bigger picture.
After an initial fact check, in this talk we motivate a new angle of view on the ICT infrastructure sustainability, originally proposed and currently pursued in a European research project SNS JU EXIGENCE. We identify the lack of measurements in the ICT sector at large and in the network infrastructures in particular. We then argue that the upcoming and existing legislation on the one hand, and the interconnected, highly cooperative way of ICT service provision on the other hand, justify and require service-level measurements of energy consumption and CO2e emissions, as opposed to domain-centric approaches. Equipped with these measurements, we lay out a cooperative framework, which, beyond pure optimization measures, addresses energy consumption and CO2e emission reduction through explicit user involvement and also supports dedicated incentivization measures for digital sobriety.
Join us in exploring the future of telecommunications! We look forward to seeing you there!
