Road safety is a primary concern of the modern society as accidents cut short the lives of approximately 1.2 million people every year. Moreover, road traffic injuries remain as the leading cause of death for children and are responsible for many non-fatal injuries. Automated driving, enabled through instantaneous access to information for improved situational awareness can help mitigate this toll while enhancing the efficiency of transportation.
Mastering this challenge requires a large volume of information to be curated and shared to all traffic participants. This leads to an upgrade of information networks, through inclusion of precise sensors, seamless connectivity at low latency, and a powerful compute infrastructures to fuse, in real time, the vast amounts of data generated.
The 6th generation (6G) of wireless tech is seen as a key player in our digital era. It holds great potential for boosting opportunities and creating new technologies across various sectors like manufacturing, energy, healthcare, government, education, and efficient transportation.
6G-EWOC plays a crucial role in advancing autonomous driving. It achieves this by linking vehicles and instantly sharing their information with all traffic participants, ensuring safety and efficient transport.
6G-EWOC’s mission is to provide the enabling photonic technology to accommodate vehicular awareness on its surroundings through light-based sensing, the connectivity among vehicles and the road infrastructure through optical wireless communication, a seamless interconnection to nearby datacentres through high-capacity fibre-optics, and real-time computation of the collected road-side data through high-end datacentre technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be adopted to enhance the efficiency of several constituent technologies and the orchestration of this vehicular 6G infrastructure.
AIT will be responsible to provide optical wireless communication technologies for wireless communication among vehicles, high-bandwidth connectivity between vehicles and the infrastructure, as well as high-capacity free-space optical links.
Start: 01.01.2024
End: 31.12.2026
Goals:
- Optical wireless communication for vehicle-to-vehicle and high-rate vehicle-to-infrastructure applications, leveraging chip-scale optical beamformers
- Development of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and electronic ASIC technology supporting high-capacity fronthaul enabled through quasi-coherent reception
- AI-assisted control and orchestration of network resources in the 6G-EWOC architecture
- Efficient deployment of low-complexity connected laser/radio detection, ranging and communication (LiDAR/RaDAR) technology
- SDN supporting the programmability of a flexible fronthaul network in connected mobility scenarios and intra-datacenter networks
- AI-based applications for autonomous vehicles employing multiple sensor technologies
Funding: EU 6G Smart Networks and Services (SNS)
Links: www.6g-ewoc.eu
Partners: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, III-V Lab, Bifrost Communications, Nvidia, Nokia Bell Labs, Beamagine, Magna, OTE, Ligentec
