On November 7-8, 5G-STARDUST pulled off a multifaceted participation at this year’s FOKUS FUSECO Forum, the flagship event annually organised by project partner Fraunhofer in Berlin (Germany), focused, this time more then ever, on all efforts projecting us “Forward to 6G”, as the Forum’s title indicated.

During the first day of the Forum, 5G-STARDUST participated in multiple sessions, with representatives of the project delivering presentations on different aspects of the work in progress: Alessandro Guidotti, from project partner Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT) was the first to take the stage, as part of the afternoon segment of the “3rd Euro NTN Workshop: TN NTN Unification, Non-Terrestrial Networks in the 6G Era – Current Topics and Latest Advancements”. Within his presentation, entitled “NTN evolution: stepping into 6G”, Guidotti tapped into the standardisation angle, aptly offering an overview of the evolution of NTN within 3GPP 5G-Advanced/6G, and highlighting how – with the integration of the Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) component in the global telecommunications infrastructure becoming a reality thanks to 3GPP Rel. 17 – the door for the seamless integration of air-/space-borne network elements in the 5G system is now open, to achieve ubiquitous and continuous connectivity. Guidotti then expanded upon the further steps required for 6G communications, encompassing a native NTN component in a terrestrial/non-terrestrial jointly optimised infrastructure yielding unprecedented benefits in Industry, Society, and Economy.
5G-STARDUST’s Project Coordinator, Tomaso de Cola (DLR) followed, as part of the line-up of the subsequent segment of the Euro NTN Workshop, adding the piece of “The 5G-STARDUST Vision” (as per the title of his presentation) to the puzzle to step into the 6G era. In his talk, de Cola touched upon the main architecture building blocks and networking elements paving the way towards a seamless transition to 6G, with particular attention to key functionalities in such a network disaggregation, multi-connectivity functions, network slicing, and space edge computing.
Synergies in action

5G-STARDUST also hosted a booth within the event’s showcase area, in synergy with and featuring promotional material of fellow SNS JU projects 6G-NTN and ETHER, which share with us the quest for the integration of TN and NTN, and NTN into 6G. The latter of these projects was also represented in the Euro NTN Workshop by Lechoslaw Tomaszewski of Orange Polska, who presented the architectural framework proposed by the ETHER project for a unified 3D mobile network operating in the terrestrial, aerial, and satellite layers, as well as selected enablers of this architecture. As Tomaszewski explained, such architecture will be instantiated for demonstration of a series of use cases, including service provisioning to delay-tolerant IoT applications over intermittent satellite connectivity, unified RAN for direct handheld access, and air-space safety-critical operations.
About FOKUS FUSECO Forum
In its role as an internationally recognised industry-oriented event, the Forum mirrors the lessons learned from global public and private 5G network deployments, and 5G evolution research and standardisation, in a landscape where increasing interest in private industrial campus network deployments, and industries preparing to become ready for the 6G age can be witnessed. As hinted at in the recap of our activities at the event, this year’s discussion focused on the new momentum in international standardisation and building up new ecosystems sparked by the latest innovations in the fields of Open RAN, sub THz Radio Systems, Non-Terrestrial Networks, Network Automation, AI/ML, Open Source Toolkits, as well as new envisaged 6G use cases demanding a critical assessment of emerging 6G technologies and architectures.