ETHER Final Showcase

Demonstrating Sustainable 3D Terrestrial–Non-Terrestrial Networks for Future 6G Services

Join us for the ETHER Final Showcase Webinar, the concluding event of over than three-years Horizon Europe project reshaping future connectivity through the integration of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks into a unified, sustainable 3D Radio Access Network (RAN). ETHER has advanced an AI-driven, zero-touch approach to resource management and orchestration, targeting 100% coverage, 99.99999% reliability, 3× higher energy efficiency, and up to 95% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership compared to today’s terrestrial-only infrastructures. Built on a fully programmable, multi-layered edge-computing and caching architecture, ETHER has delivered key innovations such as direct handheld device access, unified waveform design, flexible satellite payloads, and seamless vertical handovers across terrestrial, aerial, and space platforms, and a zero-touch network management and orchestration framework.

The webinar will showcase live demonstrations of three flagship use cases: 

1. Global service provisioning for delay-tolerant IoT applications,
2. Direct handheld device access enabled by TN–NTN vertical handovers, and
3. Persistent connectivity for safety-critical airspace operations, highlighting impact across IoT, mobility, rural connectivity, aviation, and emergency response.

ETHER’s final showcase offers a unique opportunity to explore the project’s validated solutions and their role in enabling scalable, energy- and cost-efficient 6G networks that bridge the digital divide and drive future investment in NTN integration. 

Demonstrations

Service Provision to Delay-Tolerant IoT Applications 

Use Case 1: Flexible payload-enabled service provisioning to semantics-aware and delay-tolerant IoT applications
Partners involved: i2CAT (Leader), Sateliot, Linköping University, Ubiwhere 

This demonstration showcases how ETHER enables global NB-IoT connectivity for delay-tolerant massive IoT services over LEO satellite constellations, even under service and feeder link discontinuities. By leveraging regenerative flexible payloads and a ground-based AI-enabled MANO framework, satellites can dynamically activate, coordinate, and transfer service context across coverage regions, ensuring continuity. The demo highlights a scalable and sustainable approach for mMTC deployments in rural, remote, and offshore environments. Finally, by leveraging a semantics-aware information handling framework, only the most important for the IoT application device data is dispatched to the satellites. This results in notable energy savings for the devices with respect to their energy consumption without such a semantics-aware framework.  

Direct Handheld Device Access, Enabled by TN-NTN Vertical Handovers 

Use Case 2: Unified RAN for direct handheld device access at the Ka-band
Partners involved: University of Luxembourg (Leader), National Centre of Scientific Research Demokritos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

This demonstration presents ETHER’s unified RAN solution for direct access from LEO satellites to handheld devices, supporting seamless connectivity anywhere. It leverages a novel prototype of an electrically beam-steerable handheld antenna design that can follow the trajectory of the satellite, thus maintaining an adequate received signal strength. Moreover, a showcased energy-efficient vertical handover from a terrestrial gNB to a satellite-based one bridges the terrestrial with the non-terrestrial network, offering a practical path toward 100% coverage and closing the digital divide. Finally, this demonstration activity is built using OpenAirInterface for the RAN software stack and includes a hardware-in-the-loop setup enhanced by an FPGA-based channel emulator, which emulates realistic LEO satellite conditions. 

Airspace Safety-Critical Operations 

Use Case 3: Architecture demonstration for air-space safety-critical operations
Partners involved: Collins Aerospace (Leader), Nearby Computing, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Avanti, NetAI

This demonstration  has been developed to showcase two scenarios addressing  challenges in offering reliable and ubiquitous 3D aircraft communication services and edge computing applications/resources orchestration. The first scenario focuses on the energy-efficient allocation of network resources, i.e., demonstration of aircraft communication services and connectivity provisioning under guaranteed performance. The second scenario focuses on the  proactive energy-efficient edge computing resource allocation. Finally, a combination of vertical and horizontal handovers across the trajectory of the aircraft enables its continuous coverage.