Partnerships lead the way to 6G

Ericsson is very proud to be involved in this endeavor and we look forward to seeing these projects blossom with our support, and witnessing technical breakthroughs that will make their mark on 6G mobile networks.

A two-year journey

This event is the culmination of an interesting journey over the last couple of years:

1. We started with initial discussions among a handful of like-minded technical experts in industry about the need to energize and coalesce US research efforts on 6G.
2. This was followed with individual contacts with NSF, which became a more structured group preparation for a smaller partnership with four companies. One potential partner had to drop out and we were set to proceed with three, and we settled on the themes of the solicitation, namely resilience and enabling technologies.
3. There was a surge of interest at what seemed to be the last moment from both industry and government, and we ended up with a much larger partnership, composed of nine industrial partners (Ericsson, Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm, and VMware), and three government partners (NSF, Department of Defense and National Institute of Standards and Technology).
4. After another round of discussions to further shape the solicitation content with inputs from all the additional partners, we were finally ready to go. The total funding budget is $40 million, with each project receiving about $1 million over three years.
5. The solicitation went out in April 2021, and over 200 proposals were received. After extensive reviews by NSF panels, and further inputs from industry partners, eventually 37 proposals were selected for funding.

Ericsson's interest in US 6G research

Our recent blog article “Make haste slowly - the long and winding road to 6G” discusses Ericsson’s interest in US 6G research and the urgency to start now to achieve the first large-scale 6G deployments around 2030. We also emphasize the need to provide a long enough runway for research to mature into 6G. The combination of urgency and patience constitutes what we called “making haste slowly” towards 6G. The article mentions several 6G-related efforts ramping up in the US where we are active participants, and we feel NSF RINGS is the cornerstone of those efforts.

The NSF partnership model is a great fit for Ericsson’s ambition to engage with academia, industry and government to energize research towards 6G in the United States. Since academia is already familiar with NSF’s processes, and the public-private partnership mechanism is well established, we have been able to focus on shaping the funding solicitation by working with our industry partners, including those from outside the inner circle of mobile vendors, such as the cloud, software and electronics segments, where US companies are global leaders.

The winning proposals

The winning proposals came from all over the US, as illustrated in the map below. Some were from “the usual suspects,” that is universities that have well-established wireless research activities and dedicated research centers, such as UT Austin, NYU and Rutgers, or top-ranked universities, such as MIT, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. But some others were less familiar – to us at least – such as New Mexico State University or Florida Atlantic University, which we find very refreshing, and shows a wide interest in the RINGS program.

Winning proposals - Geographical distribution

Distribution of research themes

The RINGS solicitation rubric called for every proposal to cover at least one topic from each of the two themes: A) resilient networks and B) enabling technologies. This gave proposals a systems flavor, which we find very appealing, as it resonates with our own system thinking about networks: We see individual technology components are important, but the secret sauce is how they can be integrated and made to work well within a complex system.

Each of the two themes was further broken down into four subject areas. The graph below shows how the winning proposals map onto the themes and subject areas. We note that the topic of intelligence / adaptivity was popular under resilient networks.

Winning proposals - Distribution of research themes

Conclusion

We expect the NSF RINGS program will support and sustain academic research in the US and attract the best and brightest academics to 6G topics. We also believe the projects within the program will trigger collaborations between our research organization, as well as those of our partners, and US academia. We look forward to seeing the research outcomes, which we expect will provide breakthrough technologies that may potentially become components of the eventual 6G standards and products.