Munich Workshop
“Bringing 6G into Application”

The ITG KT2 Munich Workshop on “Bringing 6G into Application” took place on May 28, 2025, at Nokia Munich offices. About 30 participants from industry and academia discussed how to bring and integrate 6G into applications. Expert talks from industry and demonstration sessions in Nokia’s Digital Creativity Lab showed the current directions in research and industry.

The report was published in the ITG News 4/2025.

The idea for this workshop emerged during the WueWoWAS workshop 2024 in Würzburg. In an interactive session on how researchers and PhD students can benefit from the VDE ITG expert group KT2 “Communication Networks and Systems”, the audience acknowledged the value of KT2 to successfully connect industry and academia, to exchange ideas and knowledge. In particular, there was a high interest of the attendees in better understanding industrial 6G use cases and what is driving research in industry, in particular.

Dr.-Ing. Christian Mannweiler (Network Architecture Research at Nokia Strategy & Technology at Nokia Munich) took up this idea and offered to host a workshop at Nokia Munich in an engaging way. As a result, the VDE ITG KT2 interactive workshop on “Bringing 6G into Application" provided the opportunity for a technical and scientific exchange. To create an interactive and engaging agenda that reflects the participants’ interests and priorities in bringing 6G technologies closer to real-world applications, the call for participation offered the possibility to bring in topics, questions, or discussion points to the speakers and to a panel.

Invited Talks

First, Dr. Maciej Muehleisen (Ericsson) gave a talk on “Integrating 6G into Applications” and highlighted what is required for a 6G integration with applications. In particular, the need for common APIs as suggested by e.g., the CAMARA initiative was highlighted, and it was discussed how an “APIs first” approach can be successful. At the same time, insights on time-sensitive networking in 5G and 6G were conveyed. An interesting remark was on the trade-off between the complexity and reliability of communication networks, while often the environment may already put bounds of reliability outside the communication system, e.g., due to power outages or extreme weather conditions.

Dr. Bernhard Kloiber (Siemens) then focused on requirements and applications for industrial 6G. In particular, the need for simplicity, dependability, as well as sustainability of 6G was highlighted. The key is to create easy-to-use solutions, ensure reliability and robust performance, and prioritize environmental and social responsibility throughout their operations and product development, especially in the context of smart factories to optimize processes. It was emphasized that the 5G use cases, especially in industrial settings, are still valid for 6G. Due to the long lifecycles in industrial manufacturing, 6G rather needs to be an evolution of 5G, by maintaining backwards compatibility with current 5G deployments.

Philipp Landgraf (Hololight) then showed a different perspective on 6G networks by focusing on "Scaling XR with Streaming over 5G". The key idea is to compute the XR and the involved 3D models in a (secure) cloud, while the resulting pixel video stream is delivered to the users. This offers advantages regarding privacy, since data and models are not transmitted, but also platform-independence. It was interesting to hear that network performance variances, such as jitter, can be overcome for this use case by prediction and reprojection mechanisms, such that latencies up to 150 ms and network throughput in the order of tens of Mbps are sufficient. For this application, which primarily focuses on enterprise XR services, WiFi networks are not sufficient to host a larger group of parallel users, while cellular networks, in particular 5G networks allow to do so.

Interactive Demo Session

The second half of the workshop was dedicated to interactive demo sessions in Nokia’s Digital Creativity Lab. Nokia showed the potential of joint communication and sensing of connected cars. Dr. Rastin Pries impressively demonstrated how digital twins can provide added value from different perspectives. Technically, small-scale base stations and core networks are possible today, and can be even integrated within a car to spawn a local private 5G network.

Rüdiger Halfmann demonstrated time synchronization services in a 5G environment, which is crucial in an industrial manufacturing context, where exact timing is required, e.g. when automated robots and conveyor belts need to interact at high speed. However, the air interface and required retransmissions may cause delay jitters, which lead to severe issues in that context or limit the production speed and quality. However, with advanced PTP mechanisms, the jitter and resulting inaccuracies could be reduced from up to 15 ms to the order of microseconds.

Fabian Schlage showed a different use case where private 5G campus networks are a tool to go beyond connectivity, but which also allow integrating task management with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) services in the background while ensuring privacy and confidential settings. More specifically, Nokia provides private 5G campus networks that enable secure, high-speed connectivity for industrial environments. Integrated with ERP asset management and IoT platforms, allowing real-time tracking, predictive maintenance, and increased operational efficiency.

Discussions and Conclusions

The official part of the workshop was concluded with a panel consisting of the three above industry speakers, Prof. Dr. Tobias Hossfeld (Uni Würzburg) and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kellerer (TU München), speakers of the ITG KT2 expert group, to discuss the questions from the audience: What are 6G use cases? How to enable sustainable research testbeds? How to get access to real-world data? What is an appropriate tradeoff between data privacy and added value by data-driven innovation?

The workshop participants continued the insightful technical discussions during the dinner event at a traditional Bavarian Wirtshaus.

Overall, the workshop took place in an inspiring atmosphere and setting. We will look forward to future editions of this activity.

Christian Mannweiler (Nokia)
Tobias Hoßfeld (University of Würzburg)
Wolfgang Kellerer (TU Munich)