Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems

6G NeXt

6G Native Extensions for XR Technologies

While quarantine a women watching live streaming by application on smartphone
© iStock / Worawee Meepian

Future services and applications, especially in the area of multimedia, will generate an unprecedented amount of data for industry, media and private users, which needs to be transmitted at a speed and reliability that today's mobile networks would not achieve. The project “6G Native Extensions for XR Technologies” – 6G NeXt, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), aims to develop a scalable, modular and flexible infrastructure enabling a variety of industrial and end-user use cases with requirements exceeding those of today's 5G network in terms of intelligence, performance and efficiency.

The project consortium brings together nine German partners from industry and academia including startups and SMEs. Two associated partners will support the project as well. The project will be coordinated by T-Labs, the R&D unit of Deutsche Telekom.

Two particularly challenging applications with different requirements will be developed:

  • Intelligent Drones: A novel anti-collision system for aviation using the example of drones at airports with mixed air traffic. The flight paths of aircraft are monitored in real time and collision risks are predicted using algorithms. In case of danger, evasive maneuvers are calculated centrally and, unlike today's solutions, the aircraft are also controlled via 6G. These applications require low latency, synchronization of data streams and the possibility of distributed computation of data (split computing).
  • HOLOCOM (Holographic Communication): An interactive end-to-end transmission of real-time 3D holographic video with photorealistic content and realistic 3D depth for video conferencing. This application requires very high bandwidth for up and down streaming of the high bitrate 3D holographic content together with ultra-low latency for enabling interactive and immersive real-time communication. In addition, a distributed and intelligent media processing pipeline for enabling the rendering and playback of photorealistic content on consumer devices by taking advantage of the split rendering capability that will be provided by the underlying 6G infrastructure.

Fraunhofer FOKUS is a key partner in the 6G NeXt consortium and will contribute its expertise, tools and testbeds in 5G, media streaming and real-time communications to the research and development of the 6G NeXt infrastructure and evaluate its feasibility using the HOLOCOM application, an interactive end-to-end transmission of real-time 3D holographic video with photorealistic content.

The other partners of the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) funded project are Deutsche Telekom AG, DFKI, LogicWay GmbH, SeeReal Technologies GmbH, TH Wildau, TU Berlin, TU Ilmenau, Volucap GmbH as well as Flugplatzgesellschaft Schönhagen mbH and IDRF e. V.