The 6G White Paper, an interview with Carlos Jesús Bernardos Cano

Carlos Jesús Bernardos is co-leading editor of the 6G White Paper, Associate professor at UC3M and Vice-President of 5TONIC.

Interview by Jacques Magen, Senior Project Manager AUSTRALO.

In November 2020, the 5G Infrastructure Association requested its Vision and Societal Challenges Working Group to work on a 6G White Paper, to present a European vision on 6G. The paper is now on its verge of completion. COREnect’s WP4 Leader Jacques Magen has interviewed Carlos Jesús Bernardos from University Carlos III of Madrid, who has just taken over as lead co-editor of this White Paper from his colleague Arturo Azcorra, who was the previous lead co-editor, along with Mikko Uusitalo from Nokia (who is also the project coordinator of the Hexa-X flagship project).

Jacques: Good morning Carlos. Thank you for accepting to be interviewed by the COREnect project for our 3rd newsletter. Could you please present yourself?

Carlos: First of all, thank you very much for the kind invitation. I’m Carlos J. Bernardos, professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) and Vice-president of the 5TONIC open research and innovation laboratory. I received my Telecommunications Engineering degree in 2003 and my PhD in Telematics engineering in 2006, both from UC3M. I’m co-author of more than 100 publications in international journals and conferences, and an active participant in standardization, mainly at the IETF and ETSI. I’ve participated in several EU-funded projects for the last 15+ years, being the Technical Manager of MEDIEVAL and 5GEx, and the project coordinator of 5G-TRANSFORMER and 5Growth.

J: You recently succeeded your colleague Arturo Azcorra as lead co-editor of the 5G IA 6G White Paper, working together with Mikko Uusitalo from Nokia. According to you, what are the main objectives of such a paper, and what kind of feedback are you expecting?

C: The whitepaper covers quite a good range of aspects. It leverages the learnings from 5G deployments and innovations, and what COVID-19 has taught us as a society in terms of what connectivity platforms may bring, and provides a vision of the overall context and motivation for the future 6G. It describes the positioning of the EU and other stakeholders in the process of defining the societal and business potential of 6G, and then goes over the main expected key objectives of 6G, enumerating the principal key technologies and enablers, as well as shedding some light into how the future 6G architecture may be. The whitepaper also aims at including some recommendations and summarizing the main timeline of the different organizations and initiatives involved in the future development of 6G.

In terms of feedback, I think this whitepaper could be key as a reference for all the relevant players in the area of mobile communications and 6G, both the ones that will work on the technologies that would make 6G a reality, and the users that will significantly benefit from it. I hope this whitepaper will help all of us identify the main points that need to be addressed in the way towards getting 6G defined and standardized.

J: How do you feel about current content of the 6G White Paper? How close is it to completion?

C: The content is pretty much mature. The great editorial team and contributors, who I take the opportunity to thank very much for their outstanding work, have been working hard during weeks, and the paper is very close to its final completion, currently going through different review processes.

J: COREnect’s contribution to the 6G White Paper was originally intended to strengthen the aspects related to European technological sovereignty in the White Paper, in relation with 5G and 6G. In your view, how important is this topic?

C: In my opinion, this is quite important. As described in the whitepaper, digital technologies are currently considered as critical and essential means for ensuring countries’ sovereignty, and COVID-19 has made this even more evident. We -- Europe -- need to develop strong technologies, meeting European political interests and values, as well as economic and societal goals. We need secure and trustworthy European-based 6G infrastructures to ensure the sovereignty of Europe in terms of critical technologies and systems, and to make sure that European primary values such as privacy, trust, transparency, accountability, security, and societal interests are considered. Of course, Europe needs to continue interacting with other areas of the world, promoting the adoption of its values, and working towards a better future for all of us.

J: There were several contributors from the COREnect project to the 6G White Paper, stressing possible ways of strengthening Europe’s technological sovereignty, contributing to technical aspects related to the evolution towards 6G, and drafting a dedicated section on “Opportunities for Devices and Components”. How do you perceive the role of devices and components in the overall 5G/6G ecosystem and value chain?

C: The role of devices is of course very relevant. We have learned from initial deployment experience with 5G how the availability of 5G-capable terminals has been quite important in the validation of 5G and innovation around it. I believe that many of the 6G enabling technologies would very much depend on new components and devices that will need to be designed and developed, spanning across new RF and optical solutions, plus improved and more efficient computational resources for digital processing. And, very importantly, this will need to be more secure, sustainable and energy efficient than ever before.

J: When is the 5G IA 6G White Paper scheduled for release?

C: It is scheduled for distribution during the MWC 2021, so quite soon actually. We are all very excited about it and looking forward to getting feedback from all involved stakeholders.

J: Thank you so much Carlos for providing the COREnect newsletter readers with the latest news on the 5G IA 6G White Paper. We are all looking forward to reading it!