6G networks are expected to support a much wider range of demanding applications — from immersive media and collaborative robotics to industrial automation — across infrastructure shared by multiple operators, cloud providers, and service providers at once. However, today’s telco cloud platforms were not built for this kind of open, multi-stakeholder collaboration. Operators lack a marketplace mechanism to aggregate and trade network capabilities the way cloud services are traded today, orchestration frameworks struggle to guarantee performance across multi-technology, multi-vendor environments, and AI remains bolted on rather than built into the network’s core operation.
In this context, the EU-funded SOVEREIGN-6G project will build an experimentation facility for the 6G telco cloud. It has three main components: a zero-touch Aggregator & Marketplace that lets stakeholders trade network capabilities, a Distributed Orchestration Framework that manages service-level agreements across the cloud-edge continuum, and a Native AI Edge layer for distributed inference, MLOps, and DataOps. The platform uses generative AI and network digital twins to translate high-level intents directly into network configurations, with security and trust built in by design. The facility will be validated through real-world use cases in Industry 4.0, healthcare, and inference cloud applications, benchmarked against 5G performance and released as open datasets.
