The Blurring RAN

6G-BLUR has been present in the Ericsson Imagine Live, an event focused on Innovation!

Project PoCs have been exhibited during the demos sessions, while our principal investigator Josep Mangues (CTTC) has participated in the round table moderated by Manuel Lorenzo, where success stories on technological advances in Spain, driven by innovation and local talent, have been presented.

6G-BLUR partners celebrated the third face-to-face meeting on the 21^st - 22^nd of November, hosted by CTTC in its premises in Castelldefels.

6G-BLUR was present in the ACM Mobihoc'24 conference held in Athens between 14th and 17th of October with the demo titled: "Demo: On-demand Disaggregated Deployment of Cloud-Native Mobile Network from Core to RAN". Jorge Baranda, researcher from CTTC, presented this work showing the deployment of an end-to-end mobile architecture including the joint management of the RAN and core segments.

Press Release

Ericsson ha desplegado un sistema 5G privado en el EXTREME Testbed de la unidad de investigación Services as networkS (SaS) del CTTC (Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya). Este sistema 5G privado constituye una potente plataforma para la investigación, experimentación y validación de nuevos casos de uso y arquitecturas previstas en la evolución de 5G a 6G.

Desde 2023, Ericsson y CTTC colaboran con el objetivo principal de desarrollar nuevas tecnologías que permitan a los proveedores de servicios de comunicaciones (CSP) mejorar y escalar sus capacidades de red privada.

La nueva solución proporcionada por Ericsson incluye un sistema 5G privado y portátil que permite crear fácilmente una red privada para soportar casos de uso novedosos y exigentes de alto rendimiento y un Plano de Control 5G centralizado, una función de la solución 5G core dual de Ericsson para 5G privado, desplegada en 5TONIC e interconectada con el laboratorio del CTTC. La parte de red privada de la solución desplegada consiste en equipos de radio 5G, unidad de banda base y Función de Plano de Usuario local implementada por Ericsson Local Packet Gateway para permitir la coubicación de servidores de aplicaciones que ejecutan las cargas de trabajo de aplicaciones verticales exigentes, garantizando así el alto rendimiento y las latencias reducidas requeridas.  

En el marco de esta colaboración, Ericsson y CTTC investigan sobre la optimización de 5G privado hacia la eficiencia energética y la gestión flexible de los recursos radioeléctricos siguiendo dos hilos conductores:

• El potencial de las API abiertas para exponer el funcionamiento y el comportamiento internos de la red a través de las API NEF (Network Exposure Function).
• La construcción de Gemelo Digital de la red que permita realizar pruebas exhaustivas previas al despliegue, aumentar la posibilidad de observar el rendimiento de la red y realizar una optimización continúa basada en datos.

La combinación de las API de red con las funcionalidades de Gemelo Digital de la red permite una gran variedad de servicios valiosos para los operadores de redes, como el análisis remoto, la validación y estimación del rendimiento de los KPI o las recomendaciones de configuraciones RAN (Red de Acceso Radioeléctrico) basadas en modelos de tráfico concretos. Como resultado, la evolución prevista del sistema 5G abarca flexibilidad de recursos, eficiencia energética, sostenibilidad, automatización sin intervención y capacidades de resiliencia de la red que permiten su adaptación a las condiciones dinámicas de trabajo de la red y de los servicios verticales.

Esta colaboración entre CTTC y Ericsson se produce en el marco de los proyectos 6G BLUR y 6G DAWN UNICO I+D, ambos apoyados por el Ministerio de Economía y Transformación Digital, y NextGeneration EU.

Manuel Lorenzo, director de Tecnología e Innovación de Ericsson España, comenta: “Gracias a la alianza con CTTC, nuevos paradigmas que podrían convertirse en avances esenciales en el camino hacia 6G, como los Gemelos Digitales de Red y las innovadoras APIs de Exposición de Red, son, día a día, estudiados, implementados y validados conjuntamente en el laboratorio de CTTC sobre la plataforma 5G Privada de Ericsson.”

Josep Mangues-Bafalluy, jefe de la unidad de investigación Services as networkS (SaS), de CTTC, y coinvestigador principal de los proyectos 6G-BLUR y 6G DAWN, comenta: “Estamos realmente entusiasmados con las posibilidades de experimentación que ofrece la solución Private 5G de Ericsson. A través de esta colaboración, estamos avanzando conjuntamente en nuestra investigación sobre redes no públicas automatizadas y eficientes desde el punto de vista energético y de recursos, al tiempo que marcamos el ritmo de las tendencias actuales de la industria sobre API de redes móviles abiertas y gemelos digitales de red.”  

On the 3rd of October 2024, 6G-BLUR was present in the IEEE NoF'24 conference with the demo "Distributed Sequential Cloud-Native Deployment of an End-to-End 5G Network with O-RAN Functions". This work covers aspects enabling the smart management and intelligent decision-making at the RAN segment while keeping a holistic point of view of an end-to-end mobile architecture, including the joint management of the RAN and core segments.

Moreover, our researchers Rasoul Nikbakht and Albert Bell presented a tutorial on the 2nd of October, under the tittle "Utilizing LLMs for Understanding, Monitoring, and Control of 6G Networks", drawing significant attention from industry professionals and academic participants alike. This tutorial has covered

• Introduction to LLMs and recent trends (cost, context length, Elo rating).
• Key LLM applications in telecom.
• TelecoDoc Assistant for telecom documentation (e.g., 3GPP).
• TSpec-LLM: structured 3GPP dataset for LLM fine-tuning.
• Telecom Foundation Model (TFM): pre-training, LoRA adapters, structured output, data curation, and Digital Twin.
• Live O-RAN network deployment demo in SAS LAB.

Softwarization brought flexible service deployment to multiple industries in the form of cloud services. However, a full end-to-end managed network that includes not just the cloud, but also the radio, transport, and core components, poses several challenges. 6G-BLUR targets these challenges and aims to integrate the radio access segment into an overall network management, along with the core and transport segments, so as to reach a full end-to-end network management.  

The 6G-BLUR is a 2.6 M€ research and innovation project funded by the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan of the Spanish Government via the UNICO I+D program, which fosters the creation of a Spanish industry-academia 6G ecosystem. The Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC) joins its vision for next generation networks with that of other great players in the field: Ericsson Spain, Telefonica, Keysight Technologies, Software Radio Systems, and Universidad de Cantabria.  

6G-BLUR designs and validates new RAN control architectures that allow the management of the 6G disaggregated network, from policy definition to scheduling, and that are flexible enough to meet the required time constraints with respect to the decision-making processes. In addition, smart algorithms and methods are proposed and implemented to improve the usage of network resources, workload placement and to efficiently monitor and control the network. From an end-to-end point of view, the 6G disaggregated mobile network is designed, from the radio access part to the core, according to different service-based requirements in a way that it can be treated as any other virtual service that requires some specific hardware support.  

Multiple Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs) have been defined. They are being used to experimentally validate the main concepts of the project. This includes 6G Disaggregated Zero-Touch Mobile Network as a Service, with two PoCs that demonstrate how the 6G-BLUR architecture can deliver non-public networks (NPN), and dynamic network slices with optimal performance and flexibility on O-RANs. Another key scenario includes Joint RAN and Transport mechanisms for 6G Disaggregated Mobile networks, with two more PoCs on Joint Fronthaul Capacity Control/Placement, QoS management and Flexible Functional Splits, and NPN cross-validation/optimization through Digital Twins. Finally, the focus at the algorithmic level on the RAN is mainly on deep-reinforcement learning-based optimization of radio resources in NPNs, optimization of hardware-accelerated distributed units and radio units, and data-driven xApp- and rApp-based O-RAN optimization.  

6G-BLUR partners celebrated the second face-to-face meeting on the 20^th-21^st of November, hosted by CTTC in its premises in Castelldefels.

On the 11^th of October 2023 CTTC held the SRS Workshop. In this workshop, SRS experts provided a general overview of the srsRAN Project, its architecture and main features, and its applications, and guided new users through the building/installation process and all the steps required for a successful UE (either virtual or COTS) attachment. 

Press Release

6G-BLUR partners celebrated a first face-to-face meeting on the 21^st of June, hosted by CTTC in its premises in Castelldefels.