6GVisible
“Seeing Invisible as a 6G Infrastructure Service for Autonomous Vehicles”
Executive Summary
Background
Developments of 5G and especially 6G will enable totally new services with novel software solutions and architectures. Such solutions and architectures effectively combine a broad variety of physical and logical entities, covering cloud, big data, AI, edge, and IoT. The number of connected devices will explode, ranging from micro-level devices with very limited processing capability to larger connected devices with strong processing power and large applications in the cloud. Different parts of the distributed systems are owned and managed by various stakeholders. Current architectures and scalability means are not capable of supporting such complex, heterogeneous, and highly distributed 6G software systems. In addition, the application of current technologies will create a very high energy overhead due to the lack of optimization for so many connected devices.
Goals
To address the issues, our project aims at achieving the following three main goals:
1) Development of 6G-era service and architecture solutions utilizing autonomous and semi-autonomous driving as the case service.
2) As a part of the above goal Integration of the physical and logical computational elements to a unified service deploying artificial intelligence and the enablers provided by the new network technologies.
3) Identifying and developing use cases for real-life verification and validation of the new networks and for fostering Finnish automotive, AI and network-related businesses.
Impact
This project is expected to pave the way for Finland to become a trailblazer in software development and software-intensive business in the 6G era with massively distributed and heterogeneous networks, devices, and services. We aim at a major impact on the productivity, speed, and quality of the development of intelligent software-based services. Thus, we aim at providing the Finnish industries with new know-how and solutions improving their competitive positions in the markets of both software-based services and networks.
Consortium
The research consortium is composed of the University of Oulu and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. Steering team memberships include Remoted Oy, SpectacularAI, Siili Auto and DIMECC/VAMOS ecosystem, the first company aiming at research collaboration, depending on separate negotiations with the City of Oulu and Business Finland. Negotiations for collaboration are ongoing with three other companies.
Collaboration
Inter-organisation task forces, bringing together researchers and industry experts from different organisations, will be allocated to project tasks, and there will be quarterly workshops to foster industry-academia collaboration at scale.
System Overview
The primary objective of 6GVisible is to enhance the situational awareness of autonomous vehicles to ensure their safety and security. Given the limitations in sensing and computational capabilities at the vehicle level, there is a critical need to incorporate advanced sensing technology, cloud computing, 5G/6G communication, machine learning, and other technologies to provide real-time, reliable, and user-specific data to the vehicles. Real-time data communication between Vehicle-to-Cloud and Cloud-to-Vehicle will be enabled via the 5G/6G Vehicle-to-Everything Network Infrastructure. Technologies such as network slicing and software-defined networking will be utilized to reduce network congestion and overall communication latency. To provide reliable and user-specific recommendations, multiple data and knowledge sources (e.g. vehicle, sensor, traffic, weather, feedback) will be utilized in the cloud. Moreover, machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques will be employed to improve the decisions and feedback provided to the vehicle. The feedback exchanged between the vehicle and the cloud will continually update during the dynamic advancement of automated driving.