“IRENE” Project – towards a sustainable sustaInable and reliable REliable 3D wirelessnetwork NEtwork 

UC3M’s subproject: “Achieving energy and cost-efficient ubiquitous communications (IRENE-EARTH)” (PID2020-115323RB-C33).

The continuous increase of the wireless devices and network requirements calls for continuous expansion of the network infrastructure. Traditional networks have been designed to provide connectivity in a quasi bi-dimensional space. The two-dimensional terrestrial network site deployment can be expanded by adding another non-terrestrial (NT) dimension via the incorporation of NT nodes. IRENE targets exploring the road to developing a three-dimensional (3D) network that is able to offer reliable, ubiquitous, and cost efficient connectivity for beyond 5G (B5G)/6G communications and contributing, at the same time, to the economic and environmental sustainability of the future networks. IRENE pays special attention to the new emerging physical layer technologies to enable this 3D network conception.

IRENE will accomplish the 3D network by enhancing not only the performance of terrestrial and NT systems, but also enhancing the coordination and the interaction between both networks beyond what current research offers, which is mainly focused on the network layer. That is, IRENE will develop techniques to improve the performance of the satellites at different orbits considering waveforms, access procedures, large scale MIMO processing, flexible payloads in addition to schemes to deal with the hybrid networks. Importantly, non-geostationary satellites will be considered to reduce latency. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based techniques will be developed to provide the 3D network with the necessary intelligence and overcome the limitation of complex or model-based solutions. IRENE will dedicate a significant effort to overcome the challenges imposed by the adoption of the cell-free architectures, as it is considered one of the promising solutions for future sustainable networks. The project will develop mobile edge computing (MEC)-based techniques and slicing resource management solutions to deal with the multi-service environment in B5G/6G networks. The benefits of a new paradigm of joint communication-computing-and-sensing will be investigated. IRENE will study a wide frequency range, focusing not only on sub-6 GHz frequency bands, but also on mmWave and THz bands. To enable communication in places where radio frequency (RF) is not viable, visible light communication techniques will be developed, focusing on improving its combination with RF communications. The sharing of resources between different entities in future networks increase the risk of information leakage. IRENE will design physical layer security algorithms to improve RF and optical transmissions. Additionally, blockchain technology will be combined with federating learning to achieve trustworthy AI schemes.

This coordinated project will be composed of three subprojects, driven by Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya, Universidad de las Islas Baleares, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Partners will cooperate to achieve the design of optimized and holistic solutions that overcome the inefficiency of a single subproject solution. The proposed research is expected to lead to substantial capacity gains and coverage enhancement which will be demonstrated by simulation and/or analytical results. In addition, proof-of-concept of the most promising techniques will be implemented. As IRENE scope forms important part of the expected future networks, it is expected that the project results willhave a great acceptance of the international research community.