6G is envisioned to accelerate the path started in 5G for catering to the needs of a wide variety of vertical use cases, both current and emerging. This will require major enhancements of the current 5G capabilities especially in terms of bandwidth, latency, reliability, security, and energy. PREDICT-6G’s mission is therefore set towards the development of an end-to-end 6G (E2E) solution including architecture and protocols that can guarantee seamless provisioning of services for vertical use cases requiring extremely tight timing and reliability constraints. To succeed, the solution will target determinism network infrastructures at large, including wired and wireless segments and their interconnections. PREDICT-6G will develop a novel Multi-technology Multi-domain Data-Plane (MDP) overhauling the reliability and time sensitiveness design features existing in current wired and wireless standards. The ambition is for the MDP design to be inherently deterministic. To achieve this, PREDICT-6G will develop an AI-driven Multi-stakeholder Inter-domain Control-Plane (AICP) for the provisioning of deterministic network paths to support time sensitive services as requested by end-customers and with different scaling ambitions, e.g., from the network in a single vehicle to a large, geographically dispersed network. This requires timely monitoring and prediction of the behavior of the complete network, including identifying potential sources of quality violations and analyzing various routes of the traffic flows. These capabilities will be delivered through the PREDICT-6G AI-powered Digital Twin (DT) framework, allowing the prediction of the behavior of the end-to-end network infrastructure, and enabling anticipative control and validation of the network provisions to meet the real-world time-sensitive and reliability requirements of the running services.

The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) will be the 5G worldwide standard for railway operational communications, conforming to European regulation as well as responding to the needs and obligations of rail organisations outside of Europe. The work on functional & technical requirements, specification & standardisation in 3GPP as well as regarding harmonised spectrum solutions is currently led by UIC, in cooperation with the whole railway sector. A major challenge is the update by European Railway Agency of the Technical Specifications for Interoperability of Control Command and Signalling (CCS TSI) by the end of 2022 with a full description of FRMCS with respect to interoperability functions. Therefore, the 5GRAIL project aims to verify the first set of FRMCS specifications and standards (FRMCS V1) by developing and testing prototypes of the FRMCS ecosystem. The validation of the latest available railway-relevant 5G specifications will be achieved through cross-border emulation trials covering significant portions of railway operational communication requirements and including the core technological innovations for rail expected from 5G release 16 and pre-release 17. The project will first define functional tests and then work towards the development and evaluation of prototypes, for both on-board and infrastructure, including vital (ETCS, ATO) and essential (voice specific services, TCMS and video) applications. Prototypes will be then tested in simulated and real environments, with pilots in labs and in the field rolled out in various European sites (France, Hungary and Germany), to ensure compliancy and validation for FRMCS specifications, standards and performance, and consequently guarantee the time to market for FRMCS deployments, planned for 2025 as per European timeline. 5GRAIL will finally deliver test report conclusions to potentially update FRMCS V1 specifications and to identify technical constraints related to implementation issues.