The 6G Smart Networks of the future will provide the high-performance and energy-efficient infrastructure on which next generation internet and other services can be developed and deployed. 6G will foster an Industry revolution and digital transformation and will accelerate the building of smart societies leading to quality-of-life improvements, facilitating autonomous systems, haptic communication and smart healthcare. To achieve the aforementioned objectives in a sustainable way, it is well understood that new approaches are needed in the way the telco infrastructures are architected, federated and orchestrated. These new approaches call for multi-stakeholder ecosystems that promote synergies among MNOs and owners of all kinds or computational and networking resources that will share the extraordinary costs of yet another generation upgrade from 5G to 6G, while facilitating new business models. It is clear, that the new architecture paradigms bring unprecedented complexity due to the sheer scale and heterogeneity of the orchestration domains involved, that should be matched by equally capable automation capabilities, thus 6G is aiming for the “holy grail” of pervasive AI-driven intelligence, termed as Native AI. However, the multi-stakeholder infrastructures foreseen in 6G as per the “network of networks” concept, will add a level of unprecedented management complexity due to the sheer scale and heterogeneity of the orchestration domains involved. 6G-INTENSE aims to abstract and federate all kinds of computational and communication resources under an internet-scale framework, that is governed by an intelligent orchestration paradigm, termed as DIMO.

FLECON-6G gathers key participants from Phase-1 and Phase-2 SNS JU projects, aiming to make the “Intelligent 6G Network of Networks” vision a reality, with Trustworthiness and Generalisability of Native AI and Network Digital Twins (NDT) assisted approaches. It aims to deliver key technological assets in the form of collaborative and distributed frameworks offering scalability and support for multi-domain, multi-stakeholder infrastructures, jointly with network infrastructure programmability that supports the offloading of network application logic. FLECON-6G provides groundbreaking research to drive the next phase of 6G Native AI research, addressing Trustworthiness and Generalizability via novel intent-driven frameworks and robust Foundation Models, that not only deliver zero-touch orchestration but also performance guarantees and robustness in multi-stakeholder infrastructures. A multi-layer, multi-vendor NDT framework will also assist online decisions and resolve conflicts among multiple closed control loops operating in reactive, proactive or predictive mode for zero-touch self-optimisation. At the business layer, a Smart Marketplace will facilitate the creation of a wide, sustainable ecosystem of highly diversified stakeholders, through which, MNOs, digital service providers, verticals and software developers of AI or DT software applications will jointly collaborate to build more integrated and intent-driven service offers, composing a plethora of modular assets for their effective monetisation. In line with EU’s policies, FLECON-6G will design, develop and validate through relevant PoCs, several secure, trustworthy, resilient and reliable solutions across 4 heterogeneous verticals that require 6G performance capabilities. FLECON-6G will strongly impact standardisation, with significant contributions to 3GPP, ITU, ETSI, GSMA and O-RAN and open-source communities.