Nokia and Inria announced the renewal of their common research deal for the next four years.
The pair have been working together since 2008 having pooled 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 personalised experiences in the digital connected world.
In a press release the companies said that future networks will have to be completely cloud-native, supporting a distributed architecture which is managed artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) -driven autonomy.
The Nokia Bell Labs-Inria collaboration will investigate distributed learning over 6G to enable diverse AI applications operating in a distributed and cooperative way all over the system (core, network, edge, device), continuously learning and evolving.
It will also investigate AI-based smart network management to provide analytics and trustworthy AI/ML for 5G-Advanced and 6G zero touch mobile network resource management.
Another area which the pair say is important is network aware industrial applications which will optimising and adapt industrial applications, such as cloud based robotic applications based on network performance and availability.
