6G-TENET - Trustworthy open 6G telco automation

6G networks will be designed to fulfill ubiquitous connectivity, hyper-reliable and low-latency communication, or AI and communication, among other requirements and usage scenarios. Fulfilling such demanding requirements poses additional challenges and complexity to 6G networks, compared to the transition to 5G. 

The Trustworthy open 6G telco automation (6G-TENET) project will focus on three fundamental features that define 6G telco cloud: openness, native trustworthiness, and automation. In this sense, 6G-TENET takes an end-to-end (E2E) perspective at the design, development, and evaluation of such global 6G networks, both at architecture and algorithmic levels.

Openness is a natural consequence of softwarization and modularization of services into micro-service/containers. This is a fundamental feature, since due to all the complexity, it is unlikely to have networks under the full control of a single organization. Therefore, well-defined interfaces and APIs are mandatory in this context. 

Trustworthiness must be understood in multiple ways. At the data plane, the network must offer the extreme reliability required by (some) 6G services, and privacy and security also have their own implications in this plane. The task is also challenging on the control and management planes. Moreover, trustworthiness is also associated with a secure and private exchange of information, though personal information is protected and only the strictly necessary data is transferred. Trustworthy AI needs also to be considered.

Automation, by finding the most suitable AI scheme to solve the specific optimization problem at hand in a trustworthy manner and by designing and/or exploiting the generic open management and orchestration architectures that are being designed to manage the lifecycle of arbitrary AI models.