BeGREEN

Description:

BeGREEN (Beyond 5G Artificial Intelligence Assisted Energy Efficient Open Radio Access Network), is among the first selected projects to be funded under Horizon Europe’s European Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU), a public-private partnership that aims to enable the evolution of 5G ecosystems and promote 6G research in Europe. BeGREEN will take a holistic view to propose evolving radio networks that not only accommodate increasing traffic and services but also consider power consumption as a factor. For that, researchers will perform research and implementation at different levels:

• At the architecture level, planning and evaluation of a massive MIMO included RAN design to achieve flexible and energy efficient connectivity considering spectrum utilisation, interference mitigation and architecture/processing complexity.

• At the hardware and infrastructure level, radio-unit controlling schemes will be used in power amplifiers energy optimisation. Also, an offloading engine for hardware acceleration will be employed to achieve energy efficiency when performing radio access functions and network function virtualisation.

• At the link level, the integrated sensing techniques are used to provide a better estimate of the impact of the radio channel toward improvements in spectral efficiency against the increased power consumption associated with the resulting calculations.

• At the system level, the project pursues the development and evaluation of AI-based procedures to adapt the energy consumption of softwarised network functions, aiming to minimize the overall consumed energy according to the utilisation patterns of network. BeGREEN proposes an “Intelligent Plane”, as an additional plane along with user plane and data plane, that allows the data, model and inference to be seamlessly exchanged between network functions.

BeGREEN technological solutions will be showcased in three demonstrations:

• At IHP premises, the joint communications and sensing techniques toward efficient resource allocation and optimised power consumption will be showcased. The project targets using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for energy saving scenarios in the demonstrations.

• Furthermore, two major project demonstrations will be performed at BT premises in Adastral park. First, the ‘Intelligent Plane’ implemented using ORAN rApps and xApps will be demonstrated on a network emulator. Then, the project final integrated demonstrator using the Adastral testbed facilities to showcase BeGREEN technology innovations.

Expected impacts:

– Scientific:

BeGREEN would define areas of research towards improving energy efficiency of future mobile networks.

Results obtained in BeGREEN would be used as a basis for further research and innovation.

– Economic/Technological:

Leadership in green radio technologies and export to other regions in the world.

Energy efficiency improvement in industry verticals due to new services.

– Societal:

New services available to the users.

Reduction of GHG emissions as a path towards fulfilling Green Deal objectives.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.