Demonstration of a multi-technology 6G transport network integrating THz and optical network technologies empowered by federated learning

This paper proposes a 6G architecture that adopts a multi-technology transport network integrating THz links and optical network technologies to interconnect the 6G radio access network and core domains. The proposed solution operates in a self-organized manner, taking advantage of the software defined networking (SDN) control of the optical network, while suitable SDN control is purposely developed for the THz solution. An end-to-end (E2E) Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) layer is adopted, offering intelligence capabilities in service provisioning and resource allocation across the 6G infrastructure through the adoption of a federated learning (FL) scheme. The proposed architecture and the developed control scheme are validated through an experimental demonstration. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first experimental demonstration of an autonomously controlled 6G network implementation integrating optical network technologies and THz links in a common transport network. The developed intelligent management framework empowered by FL to jointly optimize THz and multi-vendor optical network equipment supporting 6G services is also experimentally showcased.