Continuum Internet and 6G

Workshop on Continuum Internet and 6G (CI-6G 2023)

Scope

The Internet is under significant strain due to its hyper-scale, the increasingly demanding services it is called to support, and the increasing number of smart devices and virtual objects that must be interconnected and interworked. Developing efficient and energy-aware smart vehicles, smart mobile devices, smart homes, smart cities, and other critical applications and data services that rely on the interaction of smart devices and virtual objects is essential. As part of the Internet evolution accommodating smart devices, innovations must consider the different types of smart devices [e.g., Smart Sensors, Smart IoT, Smart edge systems, Smart Cloud Nodes, Smart routers deployed across Continuum Edge IoT, Cloud Computing, Networking and 6G – Continuum Internet (CI)], different communication and management protocols, energy consumption and extra security and service requirements. Efficient micro and hyper-scale interconnection and interworking of smart devices are even more challenging. This is because the number of devices is much larger, and the data rates and services are much higher. Here are some of the challenges needed to be overcome for micro and hyper-scale interconnection and interworking of smart devices:

  • Efficient Architectures and frameworks for the Continuum Internet, including Industrial Edge IoT-to-Cloud-to Network Continuum.
  • Heterogeneity of Devices: Smart devices come in various shapes, sizes, and capabilities. They may use different communication protocols and have additional security requirements.
  • Micro & Hyper Scalability: The number of smart devices is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. This will put a strain on existing interconnection and interworking solutions. It will be necessary to develop new solutions that can scale down/up to support efficiently low/large numbers of devices.
  • Security: Smart devices are often connected to the internet, which makes them vulnerable to attacks. It is essential to design interconnection and interworking solutions that take security into account.
  • Sustainability: The technical solutions will be integrated into the end-to-end sustainable platforms to support all applications and services to be inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.
  • Elastic management: The administration of networks and services with direct support for all their operations. It aims to leverage self-management, automation and autonomic capabilities enabling unprecedented abstraction, disaggregation, operation, integration, and programmability in infrastructures and services. It creates a level of decoupling between the infrastructure delivering the service and the service elements.
  • Programmable techniques for remote self-operations and control: techniques for dynamic injection of code for realising application-specific service logic or performing dynamic service provision on demand.
  • Integrated data spaces: Edge-to-Cloud-to-Network based Data Spaces for large-scale data operations & relevant capabilities, encompassing the mechanisms for enhanced interoperable data services and data processing across numerous ecosystems.
  • Energy consumption: Many smart devices are powered by batteries. Interconnection and internetworking occupied a large part of the power consumption. The design of the protocols and algorithms should consider energy consumption to reduce the overall carbon footprint.
  • Mobility: Smart devices may occasionally move, leading to the network topology change. The design of the interconnection and internetworking should cover the mobility aspects.
  • New solutions for inter-computing management systems beyond the Internet's inter-networking capabilities would make seamless services execution across multiple inter-working domains possible, each applying different policies and mechanisms for routing, security, access to resources and application services.

The goal of the Continuum Internet workshop is to highlight recent research related to (i) architectures and frameworks for Continuum Internet, (ii) effective Management and Operations for Continuum Internet, (iii) enhanced Communication, Computing and Network Integrated Technologies and 6G for Interconnected and Interworking of Smart Devices across Continuum Internet and (iv) novel use-cases and testbeds relevant to Continuum Internet and 6G. This WS aims to complement the topics of the CNSM 2023 with a focus on Continuum Internet realisation as part of 6G.

Topics of Interest

Research works, technical achievements, innovations, and academic papers on the following topics, but not limited to, are welcome for submission to the CI and 6G workshop.

Efficient Architectures and Frameworks for the Continuum Internet including Industrial Edge IoT-to-Cloud-to Network Continuum
  • Novel infrastructures and use cases for Hyper-Scale Continuum Internet and 6G.
  • Novel infrastructures and use cases for Industrial Edge IoT-to-Cloud-to-Network Continuum and 6G.
Cloud Infrastructures with Data Spaces
  • Novel infrastructure and use cases for interconnected Hyper-Scale Efficient Cloud Computing and Networking Continuum and Hyper-Scale data spaces (e.g., Use Cases: smart cities, smart countries and other critical applications and services that rely on the interaction of smart devices).
  • Novel infrastructure and use cases for interconnected Micro clouds and Microdata spaces (e.g., Use Cases: smart vehicles, smart mobile devices, smart homes).
Sustainable Energy-aware Protocols and Cloud Infrastructures
  • Make Cloud Computing and Networking Continuum Energy aware.
  • Design and develop new Energy Instrumentation Enablers, including energy monitors and energy digital twins; APIs for (i) energy consumption control and management considering service, compute, management, and connectivity resources and (ii) rapid deployment and efficient operation.
  • Design and development of new Energy-enabled deterministic Cloud Computing and Networking Continuum enablers and APIs for data servicing across multiple stakeholders and domains and the associated strict reliability requirements.
  • Design development of new Energy-aware addressing and routing protocols for energy consumption control of the data plane.
  • Design and development of Enablers and APIs for domains/slices of a network to go into sleep mode or operate at an energy-conserving pace.
  • Design and development of energy-closed control loops.
  • Design and development of novel energy consumption models.
  • Design and development of adaptive energy-aware resource management.
Autonomic Cloud and Data Spaces Slicing and Control Services
  • Multi-domain Edge-to-Cloud Network Orchestration and Autonomic Control.
  • Autonomic Slicing incorporating self -X control loops at multiple levels (e.g., level 1- manual configuration, level 2- self-configuration & organisation, level 3-self energy management, level 4 – self-optimization & adaptation, Level 5 self-healing and protection, while level 6 represents the ultimate goal of autonomic, self-managing systems).
  • Programmability methods and protocols for Autonomic Slice's adaptation, deployment, scalability, reliability, and security of the Autonomic Slicing.
  • Programmability methods of the traffic sending rate to conserve Energy.
  • Auto-deployment slice protocol, multiple slicing types and AI-based system for Zero-touch operations are provided in the edge-network continuum.
Integrated technology for Efficiency of Operations
  • New solutions for integration of services and management systems in 6G.
  • Innovations in routing technologies and addressing future networks.
  • Resource management mechanisms for deterministic data transmission/
  • Protocols and methods for delivery of high precision services with KPIs guarantees.
  • Methods and frameworks enabling customised functions on data packets and processes to program the header of the packets.
  • High-performance in-network processing and management for routing and forwarding.
  • High-performance, programmable networks for the Edge and Internet of Things.
  • Capability exposure APIs and multi-limited domain frictionless orchestration.
  • Interoperability of multi-domain domain methods and algorithms for extreme performance compute and networking, such as very low latency, ultra-high peak data rate, time-sensitive networking, and deterministic networking.
  • Analyse and evaluate the scalability, reliability, and security of the Compute and Network Continuum.
  • Methods for efficient support for emerging application domains: Internet of senses, holographic communications, massive digital twinning, XR, fully autonomous driving, and flying networks.
  • In-network service level optimisation; predictable KPIs and QoS.
  • Management of complexity introduced for realising the additional addressing, routing, and management semantics.

Important Dates

Workshop paper submission: 22 August 2023
Acceptance Notification: 2 September 2022
Camera Ready: 8 September 2022

Paper Submission Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit original contributions that have not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere. Papers should be prepared using the IEEE 2-column conference style and are limited to 7 pages, including references.

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format through EDAS.

All papers will be peer-reviewed and the comments will be provided to the authors. Once accepted, the paper will be included in the conference proceedings and will be eligible for submission to the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (indexed by EI).

Submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register for the conference and present the work.

Workshop Chairs

Dr. Zhe (David) Lou, Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH, Germany
Prof. Alex Galis, University College London, UK

Technical Program Committee

Prof. Albert Cabellos-Aparicio; Technical University of Catalonia, Spain
Mr. Christian Jacquenet; Orange, France
Prof. Michael Menth; University Tubingen, Germany
Dr. Luis Contreras; Telefonica, Spain
Prof. Tarik Taleb; Oulu University, Finland
Prof. Paolo Bellavista; University of Bologna, Italy
Prof. George C. Polyzos; Athens University of Economics & Business, Greece
Dr. Luigi Iannone; Huawei, France
Dr. Dirk Trossen; Huawei, Germany
Prof. Lefteris Mamatas; University of Macedonia, Greece
Prof. Michele Nogueira; Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Prof. Stefano Secci; CNAM, France
Prof. Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville; Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Prof. Mohamed Faten Zhani; ETS, Canada
Prof. Kohei Shiomoto; Tokyo City University, Japan
Dr. Hakon Lonsethagen; Telenor, Norway
Prof. Leonardo Linguaglossa; Telecom Paris, France
Prof. Joan Serrat; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Prof. Panagiotis Papadimitriou; University of Macedonia, Greece
Prof. Ning Wang; University of Surrey, UK
Prof. Panagiotis Demestichas; University of Piraeus, Greece
Prof. Filip De Turck; Ghent University - Imec, Belgium
Dr. Marinos Charalambides; Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Greece
Prof. Alex Galis; University College London, UK
Dr. Zhe (David) Lou; Huawei, Germany

For any queries, please contact Yulei Wu (y.l.wu@ieee.org)

© CNSM 2023