Earlier this month, two of the major conferences on telecommunications – the EuCNC, supported by the European Commission, and the  6G Summit (https://www.eucnc.eu/) –took place jointly with the theme ‘6G for a Green and Digital Transition’. The event was a showcase for the ambitions and preliminary developments of 6G initiatives, not least thanks to a number of projects funded by the Smart Networks Services (SNS) Joint Undertaking (JU) with the European Commission. ERTICO’s Dr Nikolaos Tsampieris was in Gothenburg to talk about the expectations and potential of 6G for Smart Mobility and to present the SNS-funded project PRIVATEER.

The SNS JU is led jointly by industry and the European Commission and has set out both the strategy and the tools to develop technology capacities for 6G systems. In the past few months, the SNS JU has launched 35 projects with a funding of around €250 million. Among these is PRIVATEER, a pioneering project aiming to pave the way for 6G “privacy-first security” by studying, designing and developing innovative security enablers for 6G networks to which ERTICO is proud to contribute.

Dr Nikolaos Tsampieris, Senior Manager of Innovation and Deployment at ERTICO and ERTICO lead in PRIVATEER, was a panellist in the session “Challenges and solutions for enabling intelligent routing in ORAN using RIC and integrating satellite networks” where he gave a presentation on the “Security enablers for 6G Networks”, discussing insights from the project. The session was chaired by Dr Ashweeni Beeharee, Head of Ubiquitous Connectivity at Satellite Applications Catapult, which is an ERTICO Partner.

The event, which showcased the state of the art of research in communication networks and associated topics, is a crucial conference for the all stakeholders involved in the development and deployment of 6G technologies and infrastructures. Dr Tsampieris also participated in the session “6G for verticals: Expectations and the way forward” and discussed how 6G is expected to transform Smart Mobility. The session was moderated by Dr Raffaele de Peppe Business Strategy Manager TIM and 6GIA Board Member and Vice Chair.

The European Commission’s Director of Future Networks at DG CONNECT, Pearse O’Donohue, was the Conference General Co-Chair, along with Magnus Frodigh of Ericsson. In their written welcome statement, they noted that, “The 6G era will be driven by four important factors: trustworthy systems, sustainability, accelerated automation and digitalisation, and limitless connectivity”. The work of the PRIVATEER project, with its ambition on developing “privacy-first” security enablers for 6G networks, is of great importance to achieving these goals. 

Pavlos Fournogerakis, Program Officer at SNS JU and Project Officer for PRIVATEER, was one of the vice-chairs of the Summit’s Steering Committee and delivered the opening statement for the convened session “SNS: A European collaborative initiative with a strong vertical impact on a global level”.

PRIVATEER General Assembly sets milestones

A few days after the Summit, PRIVATEER held its third General Assembly in Madrid, which allowed project partners to meet in person for the second time since the launch of the project and convey the latest development. Consortium partners showed their enthusiasm in continuing the stunning journey that was lunched earlier this year. During the meeting, the proposed Project Use cases were discussed and ERTICO presented in detail a first version of scenarios as a basis for the respective ITS use cases implementation.