EMPOWER CONVERGED OPTICAL WIRELESS CONFIGURATIONS WITH CELL-FREE TECHNOLOGIES FOR HIGH-DENSITY 6G NETWORKS

EMPOWER-6G proposes a novel converged optical-wireless architecture that realizes an efficient 6G Cell-Free (CF)-based access network for high-density and high-coverage deployments. The proposed architecture takes full advantage of the distributed processing CF concept, as well as of wireless mmWave solutions, while being in-line with the O-RAN Alliance. Specifically, the EMPOWER-6G vision is based on the development of novel solutions at the radio access domain by enabling emerging CF technologies, while also contributing innovations at the optical transport domain and significantly evolving the MEC system towards fully elastic Edge Computing. The EMPOWER-6G network configuration deploys a distributed Edge infrastructure with Data Centres (DCs) structured in 2 tiers, featuring Radio Edge Regional Edge nodes, where the former DCs hosts the Network Functions of the (virtualized) RAN fully aligned with the O-RAN specifications, while the latter DCs host non-real-time network functions. Thus, EMPOWER-6G will shape a novel 6G network configuration by addressing challenges at the radio-edge, the regional-edge, and the network-management domains. At the radio-edge domain, EMPOWER-6G aims at designing novel CF networking mechanisms that will allow the significant scaling up of Radio Unit (RU) deployment in a cost-effective manner, by exploiting the application of the distributed processing CF concept, based on the disaggregation of the traditional CF Central Processing Unit (CPU) into Distributed Units (DUs) and a Central Unit (CU), in line with the 3GPP NG-RAN architecture. In parallel, EMPOWER-6G proposes an innovative mmWave Hybrid MIMO solution, with beam-steering and beam-sharing support. At the regional-edge domain, EMPOWER-6G aims at providing a new design for an optical regional edge network with FTTH support in order to achieve optimum functional splitting options, while also supporting novel control-plane protocols for CF networking support.