Lars Christoph Schmelz, Nokia
Coordinator Horizon Europe Sustainability Lighthouse project “SUSTAIN-6G”

To understand the implications of sustainability in 6G, we reached out to leading expert from Nokia, for an exclusive interview for Eurescom message and gathered insights on the core value of sustainability for ICT industry.

What do you think is the core value of sustainability for ICT industry?

In my opinion, sustainability is about meeting present needs without jeopardizing those of future generations. In that sense, sustainability represents a scope widening, or even scope shift for ICT industry, through introducing the “sustainable by design” paradigm, and taking a step forward from primarily looking at the network performance.

Sustainability with its different aspects (environmental, societal, economic) thereby puts on the one hand the specific needs of ICT users back to focus, driving the development of mechanisms and solutions to support the services and applications they actually ask for, and addressing their sustainability requirements such as the reduction of environmental footprint, accessibility to services, or economic viability. On the other hand, the sustainability requirements strongly push ICT industry to really deal with its own footprint, leveraging digital solutions that improve, for example, energy savings towards net zero, network accessibility and resilience, and security and privacy.

Why do we need 6G for sustainability? What are we expecting here?

As already outlined above, ICT in general, and 6G in particular, are central enablers for reducing the footprint and improving the handprint of vertical industries and the society. This includes being the driver for digital transformation and new business models, bridging the digital divide through enabling accessible, reliable and trustworthy services, and leveraging a green transformation for vertical areas such as agriculture, healthcare, smart cities or transportation.

In your opinion what learnings do we bring from 5G in order to make 6G sustainable?

From my perspective, when designing 6G in a sustainable manner, it is necessary to realistically consider what services and applications will be required by its users, society and industry, and which features 6G needs to provide, in order to serve these needs. However, this doesn’t mean to create tailored solutions for each and every use case but to design the overall system sufficiently simple and efficient. For example, with security having given a high priority already during the development of 5G, 6G must be positioned in a similar manner to ensure that the respective requirements are embedded from the early design phase, such that both consumers and businesses can benefit from Day 1 of the 6G rollout. Nonetheless, further requirements on security design, reflecting other sustainability requirements (for example, energy savings, accessibility, or even simplicity towards an economically viable solution) should be reflected as well.

How do you think sustainability should influence standardization?

Exemplary areas where sustainability goals and solutions should be influential in standardisation include energy efficiency and savings, security and privacy, data management and exposure, or the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Energy efficiency – at least in mobile communications – has always been a design target, but the topic became even more urgent with the last generations – from environmental and climate as well as economic perspective. The technology migration towards software-based features together with the introduction of AI will thereby require additional focus on the respective network parts. With an increasing number of end-users that use commercial services and applications over mobile networks, security, privacy and trustworthiness play an important role. This is furthermore highly relevant for critical infrastructure services such as energy, transportation or healthcare. And to ensure that sustainability is not addressed only in silos but considers an end-to-end perspective from the device through network and services infrastructure to the application, the exchange and exposure of data to define and track sustainability values is required.

How do you think the use of AI impacts sustainability ambitions (in the positive or negative direction)

In my perspective, AI will play a key role in both, reducing footprint of 6G and increasing handprint in vertical sectors. In both cases, the AI-based analysis of large amounts of data for end-to-end optimising the infrastructure, services and applications towards joint sustainability values provides opportunities that could barely be achieved through legacy approaches. AI will certainly help improving efficiency and productivity, and its application to, for example, production processes, can have a positive impact on employee’s health and safety or the generation of waste.

On the other hand, AI implementations are expected to be quite power and potentially material consuming, and they may challenge the privacy needs of end-users or verticals, or even the trustworthiness of actions initiated by such solutions. A careful analysis of rebound effects or – in other words – “sustainability cost” vs the benefits will therefore be necessary, which may lead to use case specific decisions on the actual implementation of solutions.

In that sense, AI is exemplary for many goals, values, metrics, and technical approaches in the context of sustainability: very often there are trade-offs and rebound effects to be considered, and there is not ONE ideally sustainable solution for a problem. Finding the right balance – or compromise – might often be the biggest challenge to be solved. But maybe AI is one option for finding such balance?

Do you think diversity and inclusion has a role to play in design & development of Sustainable 6G technology?
What is needed in practice to promote it?

Yes, one central goal of sustainability in the context of 6G will be to support bridging the digital divide, by enabling services that support the inclusion of people and societies, and even more basic, ensuring the accessibility of services to all. This will need to be backed by robust education programmes to help youth, seniors and ethnic minorities of all abilities learn how to access public information (healthcare, social and financial support and education services) and discover the tools and opportunities available to them. 6G will bring a set of technologies where this central goal gets closer to realisation.

In that sense: yes, from my perspective, diversity and inclusion must play a role in the sustainable design of 6G. And part of this design process should not only be to deep dive into the technical requirements and solutions, but promoting 6G as such enabler – being powerful, secure, reliable and trustworthy!

Finally, how do you envision “SUSTAIN-6G”?

With the “Sustainable 6G by Design” paradigm and the diverse goals, values, and solution approaches outlined above, it becomes clear that sustainability is not one single solution or technology that simply needs to be applied into the next generation of mobile communications. Sustainability is represented through a diverse set of technologies addressing environmental, social and economic sustainability aspects, and these aspects address requirements from a large number of use cases coming from different stakeholders.

SUSTAIN-6G therefore has the ambition to work towards a holistic approach for sustainability in the context of 6G. It will aim for the technology itself being built in a sustainable way and to reduce the ICT footprint. It will also help other industries to operate more sustainable by reducing their Scope 3 emissions and by providing ICT-powered use cases that improve the environmental and socio-economic outcomes from their businesses. This holistic approach shall thereby provide an end-to-end perspective, from device to application, and consider the full lifecycle of services, applications and assets. An important step forward will be to create the processes and methodologies on how the goals, values and metrics for such holistic approaches can be defined, and how technical solutions can be assessed accordingly. Central will be here, to consider the inherent trade-offs between different sustainability goals and create the processes and methodologies such that they support the balancing between them.