6G-REFERENCE, 6G Hardware Enablers for Cell Free Coherent Communications and Sensing, envisions a future where urban areas are equipped with sustainable solutions that can cope with the ever-increasing traffic demands and population densification, while providing disruptive capabilities like the materialization of the internet of sense.
For that, the European-funded project will develop integrated circuit and antenna component solutions, including dynamic frequency and spatial antenna filtering to enable efficient spectrum coexistence schemes. It will also deploy practical hardware enablers in terms of complexity, cost and power consumption that could end up constituting a reference design for future 6G-distributed radios.
The solution envisioned by 6G-REFERENCE consist of ultra-dense cell-free deployments for joint coherent communications and sensing at cm-waves, which balance the benefits of sub-6GHz (e.g. reduced pathloss) and mm-wave (e.g. wide bandwidth) ranges.
These systems face five fundamental challenges: the need for accurate synchronization among distributed radio units; fronthaul data distribution; integration of sensing capabilities; low complexity/cost/consumption radios, and coexistence with other services. These challenges will be tackled with a methodology based on exploring radio system operation in the 10-15GHz range, developing hardware concepts and showing feasibility in CMOS, and using additive manufacturing for antenna arrays and nanotechnology for sensors.
Practical Integrated Circuits and Antenna Systems for 6G Applications
The 6G-REFERENCE methodology will allow the project to create practical integrated circuits (IC) and antenna systems for 6G applications, chasing the following objectives: to have innovations for transceiver cm-wave Radio Frequency (RF) hardware addressing the data capacity and scheduling challenge of D-MIMO; to create novel solutions for accurate over the air frequency, phase and time synchronization; to provide new RF and antenna components to extend spatial and frequency domain selective capabilities at reduced complexity, cost, and energy consumption; to offer hardware solutions with low complexity, low cost, and low power consumption, and to implement coexistence with existing services in the 10-15GHz range.
6G-REFERENCE is an innovation and research project running for 3 years, until December 2026, funded by the Horizon Europe Program of the European Commission, and part of Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU). The project is a joint collaboration of 10 research and industry partners from 8 European countries.
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