EU-Wide Advantages & Strategic Opportunities – HORIZON-JU-SNS-2025-01-STREAM-B-01-01

1. Pan-European Research Synergies

• Critical mass of multidisciplinary expertise – 6G architecture, AI, serverless and goal-oriented communications require skills scattered across the continent; EU consortia allow fusion of top telecom vendors (e.g. Finland, Sweden), AI labs (Germany, France), edge–cloud pioneers (Spain, Netherlands) and vertical users (automotive in Italy, e-health in Belgium) in one legal funding frame.

• Shared flagship testbeds – leverage existing EU assets such as 5G-IA trials, EuroHPC petascale machines and pan-EU 6G corridors to experiment with constrained-AI and FaaS at realistic scale, impossible for single Member States.

2. Economies of Scale & Single Market Acceleration

• Cost-efficient joint development – one open, interoperable 6G reference architecture reduces duplicate national R&D spend and speeds market uptake across 27 countries.

• Cross-border service roaming – European-wide pilots validate seamless roaming/user-plane simplification across operators and countries, a prerequisite for the Digital Single Market.

• Pan-EU serverless marketplace – common orchestration layers allow SMEs to deploy FaaS anywhere in the Union, creating a unified demand pool.

3. Strategic Autonomy & Security

• The call’s Article 22(5) restrictions reward EU-controlled supply chains; funding at EU level de-risks industrial investment and reduces dependency on extra-EU vendors in critical network functions, RAN, AI chips and orchestration software.

• Joint certification & security baselines – collaborative RIA projects can feed ENISA and NIS2 with harmonised guidelines for secure decentralized agents and goal-oriented protocols.

4. Standardisation Leadership

• Coordinated European contributions to 3GPP Release 20+, ITU-R IMT-2030 and ETSI ISG-FaaS: a single EU voice emerging from funded projects has historically increased Europe’s share of essential patents (cf. LTE, 5G).

• Early alignment on goal-oriented communication languages positions Europe to define new protocol layers before global competitors.

5. Innovation & SME Growth

• Evaluation tie-breakers value SME participation; an EU-level project can integrate high-growth deep-tech SMEs from different regions, giving them procurement visibility with Tier-1 operators.

• Access to open data sets (obligatory common repository) allows start-ups to train/validate models without massive capex.

6. Cohesion & Regional Development

• Mandatory wide geographical coverage promotes inclusion of widening countries (e.g. HU, RO, PT), spreading 6G know-how and high-skill jobs, in line with Cohesion Policy.

• Joint pilots in rural cross-border areas (e.g. Alpine, Baltic) demonstrate AI-enabled energy-aware networks that tackle the digital divide.

7. Green & Energy Efficiency Gains

• Constrained-AI and serverless research directly support the EU Green Deal and the Net-Zero Industry Act by cutting operational energy up to 90 % via fine-grained function placement and learning under energy budgets.

• Only an EU-scale project can capture heterogeneous climate zones and electricity mixes, producing transferable eco-metrics for ETSI/ITU.

8. Gender & Diversity Impact

• Horizon rules on Gender Equality Plans encourage balanced research teams and user studies; large EU consortia can pool best practices and reach quota targets more easily than isolated national projects.

9. Portfolio & Funding Optimisation

• Stream-B rule ensuring at least one funded project per priority area increases overall success odds; consortia can specialise (centre of gravity) yet still partner in complementary proposals, maximising return on proposal effort.

• Alignment with other EU instruments (Digital Europe, Chips Joint Undertaking, EuroHPC, ESA 5G/6G) enables cascading funding and in-kind resources.

10. Concrete Opportunity Mapping per Topic Area

1. New Architectural Solutions – Create a European 6G “reference stack” validated in three cross-border living labs; feed results to Hexa-X II follow-ups.

2. Constrained Deep Learning – Form a distributed EU Edge-AI lab using federated learning across at least six Member States to benchmark energy/security trade-offs.

3. Real-Time Serverless Computing – Prototype a latency-bound (<5 ms) FaaS platform deployed on GAIA-X nodes, demonstrating cold-start-free functions for automotive & media verticals.

4. Autonomous Cognitive Agents – Develop multilingual LLM-based network agents trained on open EU telecom corpora; showcase decentralized slice negotiation between French and Polish operators.

5. Goal-Oriented Communication – Pilot waveform-level semantic compression for drone swarms over the Greek–Cypriot corridor, cutting spectrum usage by >60 %.

11. Key Consortium-Building Tips

• Combine at least 3 operators, 2 verticals, 2 RTOs, 5 SMEs from ≥7 eligible countries to meet excellence, impact, and geographic spread.

• Include a standards expert and a sustainability lead (life-cycle assessment) to score high on impact sub-criteria.

12. Long-Term EU Impact

• Positions Europe as the global frontrunner for AI-native 6G systems;

• Stimulates a €100 bn+ cumulative market for serverless telco cloud and eco-optimised AI chips by 2030;

• Delivers open, secure, and green network infrastructures that embody core EU values of privacy, inclusiveness, and sustainability.