Three Winners at the CELTIC 21st Anniversary Celebration at Berlin 6G Conference
At the CELTIC 21st Anniversary Ceremony co-located with the Berlin 6G Platform Event at BCC in Berlin, Germany on 2nd of July 2024, 3 projects won the CELTIC award for their outstanding work. One of these projects has been awarded for its excellence in the areas of green networking, and another one for excellent achievements in the category of applications and services. The Third was honoured with the Innovation Award for its outstanding innovations and high number of key performance indicators.
The awards were presented to the winners by the CELTIC-NEXT Chairperson Mr. David Kennedy from Eurescom as well as by the representative of the Public Authority Mrs Juana Sanchez (CDTI, Spain).
CELTIC-NEXT Innovation Award:
AI-NET – Accelerating digital transformation in Europe by Intelligent NETwork automation
The Innovation Award 2024
was handed over to the overall project leader Mr Achim Autenrieth, ADTRAN, Germany
AI-NET achieved outstanding achievements in the area of 6G enabling technologies complementing 5G solutions with focus on edge centric compute and AI, shaping new secure services and application platforms. Excellent results for sustainable compute platform supporting AI on top of the communications system have been successfully demonstrated. AI-NET showed highly competitive solutions for example in the area of energy efficient edge data centres. Data centre solutions are close to the best hyper scaler solution that reached power aware effectiveness of 1-1.2 PUE. That clearly outlines the competitive edge that the project has met to meet global challenges for Europs future prosperity and competitiveness.
Scientific excellence in the area of future 6G Technologies as well as reaching ambitious KPIs to secure future markets that can enable 6G Technologies have been shown.
Overall 316 scientific publications in leading international journals, conferences supported by 184 PhD and Master Thesis have been accepted and successfully finished. High business outcome is expected due to the 72 IPR, OpenSource and Standards contributions. With overall 77 Proof of Concepts, and 70 keynotes and 43 hirings the project underlines its excellence even further.
The project worked on timely solutions with regards to security, sustainability, performance and cost reduction of AI in future telecom networks. Energy Metering measuring energy consumption in real industry environments were only one part the project next to hybrid IT management solutions, incremental manufacturing. Optimized power distribution in synergy with the network management and the lightweight software layer solutions can be used as first entry point for the Telecom customer to access a Telco cloud. New AI algorithms that showed federated learning (FL) next to unlearning, analysing overfitting parametrization next to smart clustering solutions promised data saving in large scale once deployed on a computing platform.
CELTIC Excellence Award for Green Networking:
AI4Green – Artificial Intelligence for Green networks
The Excellence Award 2024 in the category green networking
has been handed over to the project leader Mrs Cicek Cavdar from KTH, Sweden
AI4Green focused around the need to build comprehensive, sophisticated and energy-efficient algorithms and solutions at both radio access and core networks, but also on data centers and storage while keeping in mind the emergence of new architectures and the development of smart grids.
The project met with the challenging goals to save 30-40 % of energy and even had progress beyond these goals when it comes to AI assisted energy savings and fault detection. The results range from research driven results to real products and standardization activities. High energy savings are often achieved when techniques as advanced sleep modes in combination with AI are used. AI4GREEN analysed an extensive amount of data coming from different resources such as 1) environmental awareness (radar measurements, wireless signal propagation), 2) Mobile operator network (deployment, traffic and performance), 3) Mobile users (crowd sourced data and mobile device services usage data).
Real measurements supported by operators’ live networks. To be highlighted is the testing in the most crowded area in Istanbul, where 14% energy savings in live networks by AI-assisted sector and carrier shutdown has been shown. 10% extra energy savings is achieved with the proposed approach compared to existing model-based approach when it comes to sector shutdown. Normally when the traffic load is high during day time, energy-saving features are not activated, especially during special events with large crowds gathering to avoid the risk of performance degradation. Via mobility prediction, modelling and analysis of temporal and geospatial crowd movements, energy saving can be selectively enabled in more than 50% of the cells for 5 hours right after a football game in the city centre.
New architectures and communication technologies such as Cell-free massive MIMO on top of virtualized cloud RAN have been studied with intelligent access point clustering and switching off. AI is used to adaptively configure 5G base stations with large antenna elements together with advanced sleep modes bringing in energy savings in the range above 30%. This high percentage comes from the deep sleep capability of modern technologies in combination with the usage of AI. Novel fault detection solutions have been developed avoiding extra drive tests thanks to the data analytics and implementation of AI algorithms.
CELTIC-NEXT Excellence Award for Services and Applications:
5GPerfecta – 5G and next-generation mobile Performance compliance testing assurance
The Excellence Award 2024 in the category of applications and services
has been handed over to the project coordinator Mr Antonio Cuadra Sánchez, Minsait, Spain
The project contributed to the analysis of the 5G performance, the supervision of 5G networks, technologies for monitoring 5G networks, supervision of services and applications as well as 5G monitoring and measurement devices. The project meets perfectly the business criteria as 5G deployment is in progress and still some experiences are needed. Obvious is the high impact of the project as at the moment the beginning of the 5g deployment it has a very high relevance for real business for operators and providers. The project as well benefited from a very balanced consortium and the integration of operators and vendors of 5G equipment versus small and medium enterprises and academia. The project has shown a broad spectrum of use cases that are relevant for business. It covered all the categories of services that are included in the 5G concept, better broadband internet mission-critical applications remote operation of machines and also to some extent the internet of things aspect.
The overall quality is perceived as high objectively measured by the amount of valuable contributions outside the project group (86) to the technology related to 5G PERFECTA, in which the main innovations of the project are being transferred: 37 in most relevant international journals, symposiums and conferences plus seven under review, one PhD thesis and nine MSc thesis, 10 contributions to standardization bodies (ITU-T, VQEG and TM Forum) and 22exhibitions and other dissemination events and activities.
The high perceived quality has been also measured with direct feedback during the seven exhibitions, events and booths carried out in the Celtic-Next Event collocated with EUCNC (European Conference of Networks and Communications) that was held in Valencia(Spain) 19-20 June 2019, the VQEG Meeting in Shenzhen (China) 14-18 October 2019, the AfricaCom November 2019, the 5G Forum day6 May 2021, the 5G World London 2020September 2020, the Joint Workshop between CELTIC-NEXT projects (5G-PERFECTA, RELIANCE, and Health5G) 28 October 2020, and the 5G Forum day4 May 2021.
CELTIC Award Winners 2024
