DETERMINISTIC E2E COMMUNICATION WITH 6G

Digitalization is transforming industries and society with the adoption of edge/cloud computing, AI and digital twins. In the future, physical processes, collaborating machines, but also novel human-system-interactions will move towards a cyber-physical continuum merging the physical world of senses, actions as well as their digital programmable representations. Fundamentally new requirements for deterministic communication with predictable performance will appear for such cyber-physical end-to-end services. Wired deterministic communication standards have already emerged including Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) and Deterministic Networking (DetNet), while 5G has specified mechanisms for interworking with those standards. However, the available support of 5G in conjunction with TSN and DetNet is not sufficient for future end-to-end time-critical applications. Driven by pivotal use cases from Industry 5.0, DETERMINISTIC6G addresses three central challenges of future deterministic end-to-end communication enabled by 6G: (1) a new architecture for 6G systems providing predictable performance and integrating it end-to-end with TSN and DetNet; (2) novel data-driven awareness of stochastically evolving network performance, with time synchronization over heterogeneous domains; and (3) leveraging novel digital twins of both 6G networks and cyber-physical systems, to anticipate situational circumstances impacting determinism of networks and safety of cyber-physical systems. DETERMINISTIC6G will also devise security-by-design for deterministic communication including the integration of edge computing and the support of OPC UA into deterministic network paths. The project targets dissemination of results towards the three essential standardization bodies in this domain: 3GPP (for 6G), IEEE802.1 (for TSN) and IETF (for DetNet). With a strong consortium driving these standards, DETERMINISTIC6G will ensure uptake of the results and insights towards global 6G standards and industry fora.