About

6G-GOALS aims to revolutionise the design approach to wireless networks by introducing low-TRL technologies for upcoming 6G architectures. 6G-GOALS breaks the incremental progress cycles of previous generations of mobile networks and adopts a semantic and goal-oriented communication paradigm for a fundamentally new approach but compatible with legacy systems. 

Specifically, 6G-GOALS will create a network of intelligence through the convergence of communication, computation, control, and learning principles for an end-to-end goal-oriented design paradigm. This requires conveying only the most relevant information for the underlying task, including learning/inference objectives for machine-oriented communications. 6G-GOALS will leverage modern ML algorithms to design data-efficient, robust, and resilient communication protocols adaptable not only to time-varying channel/network conditions but also to new tasks and data distributions within an evolving context. 

Methodology:    

6G-GOALS aims to inject the emerging concept of semantic-empowered communications for “Wireless Communication Technologies and Signal Processing”, enabling novel services where intelligence and communication systems interplay between the physical and virtual world. With the ambition to provide disruptive and forward-compatible technologies to significantly impose great impact from the EU side on global standardisation bodies, 6G-GOALS will direct the relevance of its studies for global pre-standardization WG and standardization bodies. As shown schematically in Figure 1:

                                                                     Fig. 1 The 6G-GOALS methodology.  

The 6G-GOALS’s methodology consists of:

1. Fundamental research on the selected R&I areas driven by pertinent and strategic use cases and scenarios for 6G-GOALS communication, network operation, and services, as identified by the project.

2. Innovative validation and trials to showcase the envisaged semantic-oriented communication paradigm and its high potential for 6G wireless networks.

3. Impact on European industry, global R&I, and worldwide standardization bodies.

Intended impact of 6G-GOALS:

• Impact on Products:  The 6G-GOALS project will showcase how the adoption of ML algorithms can help to learn the underlying relationships between concepts and create new communication systems that are more flexible, adaptive, and power efficient. This approach will enable the development of new and innovative communication systems that can meet the needs of future wireless and mobile systems.

• Impact on the Market:  The technology developed within the 6G-GOALS project will have a major impact on the 6G market due to the fundamental paradigm shift introduced by semantic communication and AI-based architectures over protocols and services which allows breaking existing energy-demanding and costly closed-loop control systems into lighter and more efficient tasks, that will exchange only the relevant information to convey the exact information intended by the source to fulfilling a predefined goal.

• Economic Impact:   The economic impact of 6G-GOALS will be both a challenge and an opportunity for all stakeholders. The paradigm shift brought by 6G-GOALS will bring benefits at the cost of a required technological adaptation and evolution. The 6G-GOALS solution will have wide implications for goal-oriented applications, including robotic and network management tasks.

• Regulatory Framework and Standardization Impact:  6G-GOALS is set to revolutionize the way we think about standardized RAN specifications, with a particular emphasis on the importance of semantic communications. By incorporating disrupting concepts beyond the classical way to conceive wireless networks, this innovative project will create a new paradigm for 6G standardization that goes beyond the current focus on centralized processing and inflexible functional splits.

• Societal Impact:  the project's outcome is not limited to telecommunications, as the breakthroughs of semantic communication will also reveal disruptive opportunities in other domains.   For instance, robotic systems that operate in autonomous and coordinated manners will greatly benefit from the technology developed by the 6G-GOALS project as it will allow them to communicate and exchange information more efficiently, enabling them to make more informed decisions and operate with greater precision and effectiveness.

Project Reference                                      Funding Agency                                   Funding Agency

        101139232                                                  EU’s Horizon Europe                                                     3 296 619,50€ 

EU Funding Discrimination                      Start and End dates                                       Duration

Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking               01/01/2024 to 31/12/ 2026                                                      1095 Days