First UK-India Future Networks Pilot Projects funded to support Telecommunications Roadmap

Future beyond 5G and 6G wireless systems aim to support various applications with wide ranges of quality requirements, indicated by different performance indices such as throughput, latency, reliability and number of instantaneous connected devices. A system should have sufficient capacity to support the applications. Radio Access Network (RAN) architectures such as OpenRAN provide potential to orchestrate the resources required on demand. However, real-time or near real-time operation for efficient resource orchestration remains a challenging research direction. A Digital Twin (DT) is a system-of-systems which goes far beyond the traditional computer-based simulations and analysis. It is a replication of all the elements, processes, dynamics, and firmware of a physical system into a digital counterpart. This project aims to investigate the possibility of DT technology in supporting the deployment and operation of OpenRAN in Beyond 5G and 6G towards a greener network. The investigation will be on the key components, design challenges and prospects of DT in the OpenRAN architecture as well as the impact of DT on a specific use case of energy efficiency.

The project aims to design and develop a federated deep reinforcement learning model for secure 5G network slicing, and beam selection without sharing the network and customer data to other operators (for Open RAN among cross operators). This will help telecom operators in dynamic provisioning of network resources intelligently such that these slices can be scaled up or down as desired. The work includes running two key workshops in the UK and India. Also, looping the feedback received from the workshops to the idea will improve the feasibility check on the developed models.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are considered and are often defined as the threats that are the most challenging to detect and defend against. The APT protection market is growing rapidly – 20% per year, in contrast to the 6% growth of the rest of the cyber security sector. Meanwhile, 5G is bringing unprecedented efficiency, speed and convergence, and is expected to become the digital backbone of economy and society, from smart cities to emergency management and entertainment. However, the advent of 5G not only accentuates existing advanced threats but also introduces new ones, for which existing security mechanisms are not always directly applicable.

This pilot study has the following objectives:

1. Identify realistic APTs in 5G networks
2. Define APT protection requirements
3. Provide APT detection capabilities for 5G mobile telecoms networks

Energy efficiency is a key end-to-end requirement in all domains of Open radio access network (Open-RAN), and it’s to be addressed upfront in the design of Open-RAN solutions. The technical objectives of the E3FORAN project include 1) to develop and formulate a holistic power consumption model for Open-RAN while considering the various split options in Open-RAN, 2) to optimize the energy efficiency of Open-RAN by dynamically deactivating the network element with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and 3) to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based optimization and automation framework to maximize the energy efficiency in Open-RAN.

Investigators from the University of Glasgow, UK, and the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Kottayam, India will work with leading open-RAN players to ensure that maximum impact arises from this program.