Open6G: SP3: Smart Surfaces for Joint Communications and Sensing Systems

The Open6G coordinated project, _Open RANs for Revolutionary 6G Systems_, conducts applied research on open RANs currently underway with the goal of designing and developing a 6G-based open test platform for the new network and sensing applications related to smart surfaces.

• Open RAN
• Artificial intelligence
• Network automation
• Wireless Sensing
• Intelligent Surfaces

This subproject aims to integrate reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) into the network infrastructure for communication tasks, detection, localisation, and computation.

Main results of the research carried out in this sub-project: * Design principles of an O-RAN compatible testbed.

• Data sets collected from a large set of experiments.
• An AI-based intelligent radio controller (AIRIC) to organise vRAN computing resources.
• Risk-aware decision-making framework for contextual bandit problems, considering constraints and continuous action spaces.
• Optimal design of a virtual reality network assisted by a multi-user intelligent reconfigurable surface.
• Efficiency of cache allocation mechanisms to reduce total energy consumption in O-RANs.
• CloudRIC, a system that addresses the limitations of current vRANs.
• ARES, a system capable of autonomously optimising the configuration of intelligent reconfigurable surfaces.
• RISENSE, a protocol based on transmitting amplitude modulation (AM) signals over 5G orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) signals to control smart reconfigurable surfaces to minimise the load on the 5G network.