IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)

By Valerio Frascolla

The IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) 2024, with the theme “Wireless Communications for Growing Opportunities”, took place from 21-24 of April 2024 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The 2024 edition presented a full programme of high quality, including technical sessions, tutorials and workshops, as well as technology and industry panels. PREDICT-6G was a key contributor to the success of the Industry Programme.

On the 22 of April, Dr. Valerio Frascolla, Director of Research and Innovation at Intel and PREDICT-6G Innovation Manager, was invited to be a panellist in the “6G: Midway Status and Way Forward” panel led by Majid Butt (Nokia), with Mikko Uusitalo (Nokia), Paulina Chan (Principal and CEO of Global Mutual Innovation Consortium), and Anita Dohler (CEO NGMN Alliance).

During the panel an interesting and active discussion was held with the audience of around 40 participants on the status of 6G, its standardisation plans, current architecture options and expected benefits. The PREDICT-6G position on the need in 6G for a smoother convergence of cellular and non-cellular (Wi-Fi) wireless technologies was a pivotal argument of the discussion.

On the 23 of April, Dr Frascolla gave the Invited Talk “Predictable Networks and TSN: Benefit on the Manufacturing Vertical Sector” at the industry Talk Session #2, in a track shared with Riccardo Trivisonno (Huawei), and Anita Dohler (CEO NGMN Alliance).

Valerio’s talk, focused on providing an overview of the status of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) in 3GPP and IEEE standards. He briefly described the PREDICT-6G proposed AI-driven Multi-stakeholder Inter-domain Control-Plane (AICP), and Multi-technology multi-domain Data-Plane (MDP) as the two needed key new technology enablers to effectively handling a set of current challenges in the manufacturing vertical sector, e.g., the lack of determinism and of predictability in services over multi-domain communication networks. The audience of around 50 people provided some interesting comments on the proposed approaches.

PREDICT-6G also had a strong presence in the 6GARCH: the 3rd workshop on 6G Architecture with the presentation of two papers. The workshop was divided into three parts in order to lay the groundwork and set the highest possible quality level for the topics to be discussed during the four days of the conference.

David Rico Menéndez from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid presented the paper “6G Architecture for Enabling Predictable, Reliable and Deterministic Networks: the PREDICT-6G Case” at the first part of the workshop called 6GARCH1: 6G Architecture Roadmap. The paper is available here and the presentation made during the workshop here.

Sebastian Robitzsch from InterDigital presented the paper “Formation and Assertion of Data Unit Groups in 3GPP Networks with TSN and PDU Set Support” at the third part of the workshop called 6GARCH3: Wireless and TSN. The paper is available here.

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