Scientific project to design more resilient 6G networks

The PROSPERO research consortium, coordinated by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), brings together nine organisations from six countries to transform the architecture of future sixth-generation (6G) telecommunications networks. Its objective is to overcome current telecommunications fragmentation, reduce reliance on proprietary technologies and bolster European technological sovereignty — all while reducing costs and guaranteeing mobile communications services even during major blackouts.

“We aim for a network reliability of 99.999%,” said PROSPERO coordinator Professor Marco Gramaglia, from UC3M. “That means you would be without a connection for, at most, five minutes during an entire year.”

This objective, known in the industry as ‘five nines’, applies to the radio access network. For crisis situations, the project also targets keeping critical services available 99.9% of the time, even during large-scale outages.

“The impact will be felt especially when events like blackouts, natural disasters or large-scale cyber attacks occur,” Gramaglia said. “Since operators will share resources among themselves, the effect of these incidents will be much smaller and more localised.”

Another goal is to shift an industry paradigm in which each company develops and deploys its own network, with Gramaglia saying, “We will try to have a single network and a single shared computing capacity to move toward a single telecommunications market in Europe.” Each operator will maintain control over its own infrastructure, but PROSPERO’s architecture will allow operators, cloud providers and enterprises to collaborate across these boundaries and manage network and computing as a single logical resource. In emergency situations, this resource can be pooled.

PROSPERO is investigating how to transform network architecture in the transition from 5G to 6G by replacing monolithic, expensive and slow-evolving systems (especially in the access network) with an open, flexible and intelligent platform. This new platform will run on shared hardware for multiple functions beyond connectivity, featuring native AI integrated by design and mechanisms for operators, cloud providers and enterprises to share resources securely.

The project stems from the understanding that the deployment of 5G has not delivered the expected returns for European operators, and without a change in approach, the transition to 6G risks slowing down due to financial constraints.

“[The] 5G rollout was extremely costly, and operators have not yet recovered that investment,” Gramaglia said. “Therefore, in this project, we will work on the network architecture to make it cheaper on the one hand and enable new monetisable services on the other.”

To mitigate the economic risks of 6G, PROSPERO is structuring its work around three fundamental pillars:

• Uniform, integrated and simplified architecture: This eliminates barriers between different parts of the network (radio, core, transport and edge computing) by unifying them into a single framework, lowering required investment and opening the market to new vendors.
• Tailored artificial intelligence: Rather than applying large generic AI models, the project designs lighter and more efficient models. This prevents massive energy consumption, while still allowing network operations to be automated and new services to be developed.
• Secure inter-operator collaboration: This develops a model for sharing network, computing capacity, and infrastructure among different operators, strengthening overall system resilience.
   

By targeting cost savings, revenue generation and resilience, it is hoped that PROSPERO will create concrete solutions that can be validated through a series of proof-of-concept tests and experimental evaluations, before taking them to international standardisation bodies.

“Through all this work, our goal is that when 6G technology is operational around 2030, networks will be environmentally more sustainable and more reliable,” the researchers said.

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