Nokia and French national research institution, Inria are renewing their common research lab for the next four years.
Launched in 2008, the joint research lab brings together permanent scientists from the two organisations with a newly created pool of PhD and post-doctoral scientists. The strategic aim is to solve the key scientific challenges linked to the evolution of networks and network applications.
Joint research focuses on addressing the challenges faced by future networks, which will have to connect digital, physical and human worlds in preparation for the metaverse era, when they will need to be able to optimise for a wide range of customer-specific needs.
The networks will need to be 100% cloud-native, supporting a distributed architecture, and efficiency, resilience, and agility will be critical attributes, with zero-touch management and orchestration achieved through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) -driven autonomy. Devices may need to rely on a combination of edge cloud and local near-device computing, resulting in a massively distributed computing architecture. Diversified applications and services will need stringent quality of service requirements, enabled by data/AI-native networks in a highly distributed computing and data environment.
The Nokia Bell Labs-Inria collaboration will contribute to solving these challenges by addressing three aspects. Firstly, distributed learning over 6G, with the aim of enabling diverse AI applications operating in a distributed and cooperative way all over the system (core, network, edge, device), continuously learning and evolving. The second aspect is AI-based smart network management, with the aim of providing analytics and trustworthy AI/ML for 5G-Advanced and 6G zero touch mobile network resource management. Thirdly, network aware industrial applications, with the aim of optimising and adapting industrial applications, such as cloud based robotic applications based on network performance and availability.
Thierry Klein, President of Nokia Bell Labs Solutions Research, comments: "This new phase of our collaboration addresses the strategic challenges of the future digital connected world infrastructure and applications, and we are excited about the collaborative advantages of this continued partnership for Nokia, our industry, and society to enable enhanced experiences in a digitalised world.”
Bruno Sportisse, CEO of Inria, says: "The gradual evolution of our partnership also shows the importance of building long-term relationships based on trust, within a joint strategy and roadmap. Together with Nokia, we will work on the new frontiers for 6G mobile networks, which pose new technological and theoretical challenges, where software design and data exchange must be jointly addressed."
