Funders: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the UK-India Future Networks Initiative (UKI-FNI).
Duration: 2022-2023
Project Partners: London Digital Twin Research Centre (Middlesex University) (lead partner), Rakuten (UK) and HCL (India and Vietnam)
Project Lead: Prof. Huan X. Nguyen (PI)
Project Team: Dr Quoc Tuan Vien (Co-I), Dr. Duc To (Rakuten, UK), Amit Srivastava (HCL India) and Dr. Quang Nguyen (HCL Vietnam)
About the project
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.
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.