CTTC has recently been granted by National and European research projects to design and develop the recent advances in 5G NTN.
In AROMA3D-Space and AROMA3D-Hybrid, which are national projects led by CTTC and financed by MINECO under the project Next Generation EU and the framework of RRTP, several techniques are being developed by CTTC targeting the development of beyond 3GPPP standardized NTN air interface solutions, large-scale MIMO, federated beamforming, and AI-based approach for operation and optimization at all NTN levels. AROMA3D is working on performing the first national pre-6G NTN PoC in relevant satellite environment involving in-space signal and in-orbit validation.
5G-STARDUST is among the first selected projects to be funded under the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS-JU). The ambition of the project is to deliver a fully integrated 5G-NTN system to enable ubiquitous radio access, according to an anywhere, anytime, any device paradigm. The CTTC will bring its experience to contribute to designing a unified air interface, new beamforming techniques as well as data-driven management components, building on AI/ML.
CTTC is coordinating TRANTOR project, funded under the Horizon Europe Space program (HORIZON-CL4-2021-SPACE). TRANTOR aims to take a significant step forward in the evolution of NTN component from 5G towards 6G, by the development of the technological enablers for a dynamic and automated operation of satellite networks exploiting multi-band, multi-satellite and multi-orbit transmissions .TRANTOR has been conceived as a demo-oriented project, with a first demonstration phase, to be carried out at project midterm, performing a 5G end-to-end transmission through a GEO satellite, inspired on 3GPP release 17 but upgraded to support new features as Ku-band for instance. The second demonstration phase, at the end of the project will perform advanced multi-band multi-link and multi-orbit transmissions as well as a dynamic management of the available resources.
Remarkably, CTTC also participates in 6G-NTN: the flagship SNS-JU project devoted to the exploration of the new unified air-interface for terrestrial and non-terrestrial systems lead by University of Bologna. In this project, CTTC leads the work package devoted to the creation of the new waveform and contributes to the design of AI-based techniques for radio intelligent control.
