Nokia, Inria extend research partnership to address future challenges facing networks and distributed computing

• Common research lab focuses on human, society and industrial needs in all contexts of communications and computing.
• 4 year collaboration to address key challenges for the future of smart networking and edge computing. 
• Partnership will create 15 new PhD student and post-doctoral researcher employment opportunities at Nokia Bell Labs and Inria.

Launched in 2008, the joint research lab brings together permanent scientists from the two partners with a newly created pool of PhD and post-doctoral scientists, with the strategic aim to solve the key scientific challenges linked to the evolution of networks and network applications. The focus of the joint research is on the benefits of network and distributed resources for contextual and personalized experiences in the digital connected world.

Future networks will have to connect digital, physical and human worlds to unleash the innate potential of human beings in the metaverse era. Networks will need to have the ability to optimize for a very wide range of customer-specific needs, for example, in industrial applications. The network will develop heightened sensing capabilities, and increased context-awareness in terms of user status and intent, dynamically and automatically adapting connectivity to meet user needs.

The networks will be 100% cloud-native, supporting a distributed architecture. Efficiency, resilience, and agility are critical attributes, with zero-touch management and orchestration achieved though artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) -driven autonomy. Devices may not be able to meet all compute needs and will 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:

• 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.
• 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.

• Network aware industrial applications: with the aim of optimizing and adapting industrial applications, such as cloud based robotic applications based on network performance and availability.