Digitization is driving the transformation of society and industries. While this journey has already started, it is expected to dramatically accelerate in the 2030 timeframe, as more and more technical enablers mature and spark innovations. Entirely new forms of interaction will appear, between people, between people and machines, and between machines. Immersive communication with extended reality (XR), holographic communication and exchange of human-grade sensory information will make distance disappear. Cloud and edge computing revolutionizes the availability of computing and data storage, enabling digital twins of physical entities and processes creating cyber-physical systems, in which the logic is increasingly moved into the digital domain. At the same time artificial intelligence with data-driven system design opens novel dimensions for analytics and the optimizations of all sorts of processes. These developments are expected to converge towards a cyber-physical continuum, between the connected physical world of senses, actions, experiences, and its programmable digital representations. This development will be especially important in the context of future industrial production systems, one of Europe’s strategic vertical sectors. Recently, the transformation towards Industry 5.0 was initiated, emphasizing the inclusion of humans into the increasingly automated physical processes. This can be achieved through collaborative robotics, tele-operated robotics in hazardous areas, new forms of human-machine-interactions via XR, as well as through physically supporting workers by giving them exoskeletons. These new forms of interaction with cyber, as well as with physical production systems, through virtual and augmented reality will accelerate the evolution of the cyber-physical continuum.

Intelligently networked infrastructures provided through 6G are key to this development, forming the glue that bridges the digital and physical worlds. However, a cyber-physical continuum spanning across several application areas, covering control applications, wearable robotics, or exoskeletons, and XR, is only possible with an underlying deterministic communication infrastructure. Personal wearable equipment, such as occupational exoskeleton (OEs) can reduce the physical load on the human worker. To ensure smooth interworking of OE with humans, demanding requirements are placed on computation and supplicated hardware. Computational offloading offers significantly more efficient implementations of OEs in terms of energyefficiency and costs, accelerating its adoption across various segments of society including manufacturing. This offloading necessitates a new type of deterministic communication behavior which is “end-to-end" (E2E) relevant supporting communications from the sensor through the cyber-physical representation to the actuator. Connectivity paths through the networked infrastructure with unpredictable latency variations directly jeopardize the operations of such applications. These emerging requirements mean that future 6G technology must ensure E2E deterministic communication flows across a multiplicity of heterogeneous domains (i.e., wired, and wireless communication infrastructure, cloud, and applications domains) in single digit milliseconds, and sometimes sub-milliseconds. Such deterministic communication infrastructure will play a vital role in the digitization of the manufacturing sector into a cyber-physical production system in which the entire shopfloors can be modelled, monitored, evaluated, and steered through a digital twin.

Despite this evolution of TSN, DetNet and 5G, it is important to note that these standards originate from very different system domains. TSN and DetNet are standards originating from the wired communication domain, in which equipment and components have rather stable and predictable performance characteristics. This contrasts to the characteristics of wireless communications. Therefore, the very foundations of these different standards are based on fundamentally different ways of capturing and expressing deterministic vs. stochastic characteristics. This leads to significant challenges in the following areas for which DETERMINISTIC6G will devise novel concepts and solutions.

 Three major work phases are planned.

Phase 1 (M1-M6): Deterministic service definitions along with KPI, KVIs of the use cases necessary for development of technology enablers are defined. Architectural principles considered for development of the deterministic communication architecture are defined. Also, development of the 6G centric and convergence enablers is initiated.

Phase 2 (M7-16): First DETERMINISTIC6G architecture is defined and initial technology enablers pertaining to 6G centric, and convergence are defined.

Phase 3 (M17-30): Final solution for the technology enablers with final DETERMINISTIC6G architecture and validation of the selected key features will be finalized.

The main objective of each work package (WP) is briefly described below.

WP1 sets the basis for technical concept developments of DETERMINISTIC6G project by defining 6G use cases, architectural aspect, defining KPIs and KVIs and security analysis.

WP2 focuses on the development of 6G centric enablers for ensuring deterministic communication services. Concept pertaining to 6G deterministic wireless design concept, data-driven techniques and time synchronization solution will be investigated. WP2 will take input in terms of the requirements from WP1 and will provide insights towards architecture work within WP1. WP2 also intends to provide input to validation work within WP4.

WP3 focuses on the development of new concepts and investigates the features in the direction of 6G convergence with edge computing, deterministic communication standard and situational awareness enabled by interaction with cyber-physical digital twins.

WP4 develops a 6G validation framework specific for deterministic communication following the methodology proposed in Section 1. Selected new features from WP2 and WP3 will be validated against the use case and deployment scenario developed within WP1.

WP5 ensures the project creates societal, technological, and economic impact.

WP6 ensures smooth operation of the whole project. Main activities include technical and project coordination across the whole project.