There is another good news on funding front in this week from the London Digital Twin Research Centre. Prof Huan Nguyen (PI) and Dr Quoc-Tuan Vien (Co-I) have secured an EPSRC grant as part of the EPSRC UK-India Future Networks Initiative (UKI-FNI) led by Professor Gerard Parr from the University of East Anglia. Partners include Rakuten (UK) and HCL (India and Vietnam). This project aims to investigate the possibility of digital twin technology in supporting the deployment and operation of OpenRAN in Beyond 5G and 6G towards a greener network. The investigation will be on the key components, design challenges and prospects of DT in the OpenRAN architecture as well as the impact of DT on a specific use case of energy efficiency.
Future beyond 5G and 6G wireless systems aim to support various applications with wide ranges of quality requirements, indicated by different performance indices such as throughput, latency, reliability and number of instantaneous connected devices. A system should have sufficient capacity to support the applications. The applications are diversified and versatile; therefore, we should make the system to dynamically adapt with the traffic demands of different application types. Radio Access Network (RAN) architectures such as OpenRAN provide potentials to orchestrate the resources required on demand. However, real-time or near real-time operation for efficient resource orchestration remains a challenging research direction.
