AMBIENT-6G

AMBIENT-6G had a strong presence at EuCNC & 6G Summit 2026, with a hands-on demo booth and two talks delivered by project coordinator Jeroen Famaey.

A hands-on demo booth with 5 Ambient IoT demonstrators:

A modular framework for turnkey energy-neutral IoT. A stackable platform combining a base board, communication modem, energy monitoring, and harvesting boards, with an ESP32S3 MCU enabling on-device ML and an onboard camera, and ultra-low-power sleep down to 108 nA. At this modular energy characterization setup, visitors could swap or reconfigure harvesting and storage modules and watch in real time how energy policies and hardware choices affect device autonomy and communication patterns. The setup validates optimal components for perpetual operation through hardware-in-the-loop simulations.
Real-time backscatter-based positioning. Positioning of an energy-harvesting backscatter device using an SDR-based infrastructure with wideband signals at 2.45 GHz. Attendees could move the battery-less device around the booth or obstruct antennas and immediately see position estimates, raw CSI, and uplink messages update on screen, showing how RF-powered tags enable tracking and sensing.
RF-powered electronic shelf label. A battery-less e-paper shelf label powered over narrowband RF at 917 MHz. Visitors could explore how everyday retail labels might operate battery-free, looking at stability, responsiveness, and what large-scale deployment would involve.
Cellular ambient backscatter. A demonstration of how existing cellular infrastructure can be reused by backscatter tags for indoor localisation, using LTE pilot signals as the ambient source and a standard UE acting as receiver, with real-time consumption measurement. Check LinkedIn for a guided tour of this demo.
Advanced on-board unit (AOBU). A 5G-connected unit with 3D LiDAR, depth cameras, and IMU, running onboard edge computing for SLAM, object detection, and autonomous operation.

Two talks at workshops and special sessions:

On 2 June, project coordinator Jeroen Famaey presented at the workshop "Sustainable by Design, Sustainable in Operation: The 6G Perspective," a joint presentation with the 6G-SENSES and NexaSphere projects. The talk, "Multi-Layer Sustainability in 6G," examined sustainability across the full stack, from energy-neutral devices through RAN and infrastructure to network and system orchestration.
On 5 June, Jeroen Famaey presented "Integrating Ambient-IoT devices in 6G networks" in the special session "Architecture Advancements towards 6G," organised by the SNS JU 6G Architecture Working Group. The talk covered AMBIENT-6G's work on backscatter and RF wireless power transfer, lightweight security protocols, protocol adaptation and orchestration, and intelligence orchestration across the cloud-edge-device continuum. The presentation is available on Zenodo.

AMBIENT-6G at EuCNC 2026