A European research consortium coordinated by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) has begun work on a new architecture for sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks, with the aim of cutting operators’ costs and energy use and keeping services running during major blackouts, the project’s partners announced on 19 October.
The project, called PROSPERO (Programmable and Scalable Operations for Efficient Resource-Aware Architecture in 6G), runs from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2029, according to the European Commission’s CORDIS research database. CORDIS lists a total cost of €3,276,446.75, of which €3,022,971.87 is an EU contribution, under the Horizon Europe programme.
The funding comes through the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU), a partnership between the European Commission and industry set up in November 2021 to develop European leadership in 5G and 6G. According to the SNS JU, it has an EU budget of €900m for 2021 to 2027, with the private sector committed to contributing at least the same amount.
Who is involved
Nine organisations from six countries are taking part. Alongside UC3M, the Spanish partners are Telefónica Innovación Digital and the Madrid research centre IMDEA Networks Institute. NEC Laboratories Europe and Nokia take part from Germany, FiberCop from Italy, Canary Bit from Sweden and Real Wireless from the UK, according to CORDIS, which also lists Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas as an associated partner.
Five minutes of downtime a year
The project’s headline target is reliability. “We aim for a network reliability of 99.999%. That means you would be without a connection for, at most, five minutes during an entire year,” said Marco Gramaglia, the PROSPERO coordinator and a professor in UC3M’s Department of Telematic Engineering.
That figure, known in the industry as “five nines”, applies to the radio access network, the part of a mobile network that connects phones to masts. For crisis situations, the consortium said it is also aiming to keep critical services available 99.9 per cent of the time, even during large-scale outages.
“The impact will be felt especially when events like blackouts, natural disasters, or large-scale cyberattacks occur. Since operators will share resources among themselves, the effect of these incidents will be much smaller and more localized,” Gramaglia said.
The emphasis on resilience comes from a country that experienced one of the most serious grid failures in recent European history. On 28 April 2025, continental Spain and Portugal lost power in what ENTSO-E, the association of European electricity transmission operators, described as “the most severe blackout incident on the European power system in over 20 years”. Its final report, published on 20 March 2026, found the blackout resulted from a combination of many interacting factors.
One shared network
PROSPERO also seeks to change the way operators build networks. At present, each company develops and deploys its own. Under the proposed architecture, operators would keep control of their own infrastructure, but operators, cloud providers and businesses would be able to manage network and computing capacity across those boundaries as a single logical resource, which could be pooled in an emergency.
“We will try to have a single network and a single shared computing capacity to move toward a single telecommunications market in Europe,” Gramaglia said.
The consortium said the work starts from a commercial problem. According to the partners, the rollout of 5G has not delivered the returns European operators expected, and without a change of approach the move to 6G could be slowed by financial constraints.
“PROSPERO’s starting point is a very concrete problem: 5G rollout was extremely costly, and operators have not yet recovered that investment. Therefore, in this project, we will work on the network architecture to make it cheaper on the one hand and enable new monetizable services on the other,” Gramaglia said.
Cutting the energy bill
IMDEA Networks will concentrate on reducing operating costs by lowering the energy used by radio access networks, which the institute said account for more than 70 per cent of the total power consumption of a mobile network.
Marco Fiore, a research professor at IMDEA Networks and the institute’s principal investigator on the project, said that “current industry-standard energy saving policies mainly rely on carrier shutdown based on local decisions and static thresholding, which cannot harness the full cell switch-off time that is potentially available.”
“PROSPERO will develop AI-driven solutions that operate using a broader knowledge of the RAN status and are projected to save an additional 20-30% of RAN energy costs while preserving end users’ quality of service,” he said.
Three pillars
The consortium has organised its work around three areas. The first is a single, simplified architecture that removes the barriers between the radio, core, transport and edge computing parts of a network, which the partners said would lower investment and open the market to new suppliers. The second is the use of smaller, task-specific artificial intelligence models rather than large general-purpose ones, to automate network operations without heavy energy consumption. The third is a model for operators to share network, computing capacity and infrastructure securely with one another.
The partners said the work will be tested against three business cases, cost savings, new revenue and resilience, through proof-of-concept trials and experimental evaluations, with the aim of gathering measurable evidence before taking the results to international standards bodies.
The researchers expect 6G to be operational around 2030. “Through all this work, our goal is that when 6G technology is operational around 2030, networks will be environmentally more sustainable and more reliable,” they said.