The design of 6th Generation (6G) wireless networks points towards flexible connect-and-compute technologies capable to support innovative services and use cases. Targeting the 2030 horizon, 6G networks are poised to pave the way for sustainable huma
n-centered smart societies and vertical industries, such that wireless networks will be transformed into a distributed smart connectivity infrastructure, where new terminal types are embedded in the daily environment. In this context, the RISE-6G project aims at investigating innovative solutions that capitalize on the latest advances in the emerging technology of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), which offers dynamic and goal-oriented radio wave propagation control, enabling the concept of the wireless environment as a service. The project will focus on: i) the realistic modeling of RIS-assisted signal propagation, ii) the investigation of the fundamental limits of RIS-empowered wireless communications and sensing, and iii) the design of efficient algorithms for orchestrating networking RISs, in order to implement intelligent, sustainable, and dynamically programmable wireless environments enabling diverse services that go well beyond the 5G capabilities. RISE-6G will offer two unprecedented proof-of-concepts for realizing controlled wireless environments in near-future use cases.
6G will exploit satellite, aerial and terrestrial platforms jointly to improve radio access capability and to unlock the support of on-demand edge cloud services in the three dimensional space (3D) by incorporating Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) functio
nalities on aerial platforms and low orbit satellites. This will extend the MEC support to devices and network elements in the sky and will forge a space borne MEC enabling intelligent personalized and distributed on demand services. 3D end users will experience the impression of being surrounded by a distributed computer fulfilling their requests in apparently zero latency. In this paper, we consider an architecture providing communication, computation, and caching (C3) services on demand, anytime and everywhere in 3D space, building on the integration of conventional ground (terrestrial) base stations and flying (non-terrestrial) nodes. Given the complexity of the overall network, the C3 resources and the management of the aerial devices need to be jointly orchestrated via AI-based algorithms, exploiting virtualized networks functions dynamically deployed in a distributed manner across terrestrial and non-terrestrial nodes.
