Paving the path to 6G: the 6G-PATH project's vision for advanced telecommunications' infrastructure and use cases

The path towards 6G is underway as 5G matures and is deployed worldwide, both publicly and privately. While 5G brought a step up in many fields, such as performance and efficiency, more is always expected in terms of efficiency by the overall community and in terms of performance by industry and technology providers who want to increase their offerings and products further. Continuous demands for higher throughput, lower latency and more energy-efficient communications must be supported by relevant use cases (UC)s that can claim and demonstrate the needs for these requests. This paper discusses the SNS-JU 2023 6G-PATH project vision, which builds upon an extensive B5G/6G infrastructure where a set of core architectures and domain-specific capabilities are brought together and made available for integration of applications and use cases to conduct large-scale pilots and trials. 6G-PATH fosters the development and integration of new and improved tools and products from EU companies with 5G/6G while measuring relevant KPIs and KVIs. To achieve this, the project includes designing and developing an integrated experimentation platform integrating 7 testbeds and 10 use cases spread across 4 key verticals: Health, Education, Smart Cities and Farming. Moreover, to further involve the community and obtain more metrics and outcomes, it's envisioned to integrate 2 new pilot sites and extend the testbeds with 10 additional technologies and 30 new use cases through Open Calls.