Europe’s capacity to protect its citizens and support its first responders depends on communication infrastructures that are resilient, interoperable, and intelligent across every condition a crisis can produce. The transition to 6G is not simply a performance upgrade, it is an opportunity to build preparedness, resilience, and cross-border interoperability into the foundational architecture of European safety communications from the outset.
This white paper maps the work of the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) research portfolio against the operational realities, values, and policy ambitions of Europe’s Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) community, identifies where that work is already well-aligned, and sets out where future research should focus to maximise its societal impact.
By 2040, a European first responder should be able to arrive at any incident, anywhere in Europe, and connect immediately via their normal tools to a shared operational picture that includes every other agency and asset involved in the response. The network should anticipate threats before they escalate, continue to function when infrastructure is destroyed, and support recovery, learning, and preparation once the incident is over. Preparedness is now explicitly a whole-of-society responsibility: 6G must also support the communities, schools, hospitals, and individual citizens who are expected to be selfsufficient for 72 hours when central infrastructure fails. Reaching this vision means treating 6G not as a faster network but as a genuine foundation for European societal resilience.
The policy and values frame is demanding. The EU Critical Communication System (EUCCS), due to connect all European law enforcement and safety responders through an interoperable broadband platform by 2030, sets the most immediate benchmark. Alongside it, the Preparedness Union Strategy, the Niinistö Report, the Digital Networks Act, NIS2, the Cyber Resilience Act, and the EU AI Act together define a regulatory environment in which resilience, security, interoperability, and accountability are legal requirements to be built into 6G architecture from the start. PPDR practitioners reinforce these demands with their own value-based goals: systems that work across every environment and agency boundary, that reduce cognitive load rather than adding to it, that earn and sustain the trust of the agencies and communities they serve, and that leave no person or place behind.
The SNS portfolio is strongly aligned with these priorities. Projects address the scenarios practitioners and policymakers consistently identify as highest-stakes: natural disasters, large public events, maritime environments, critical infrastructure, and healthcare emergencies. Multi-layered space-air-ground connectivity, edge computing, AI-driven network management, zero-trust security frameworks, integrated sensing and communication, and energy-autonomous operation are all represented. Four technology domains stand out as particularly consequential. Hybrid terrestrial and non-terrestrial network architectures are building the connectivity redundancy that ensures responders can communicate when fixed infrastructure is destroyed. Edge and cloud-native infrastructure is pushing real-time intelligence to the point of need. AI and machine learning are enabling closed-loop network self-optimisation, reducing operator burden at the moment when cognitive load is highest. Integrated sensing and communication is transforming the network from a passive data pipeline into a native sensing environment capable of tracking personnel and monitoring conditions where conventional sensors cannot function. The portfolio also has clear areas for development. The most consistent challenge is the gap between what performs well in a testbed and what can be trusted in the field: closing it requires operational stress-testing to become a design standard, shared operationally representative datasets, and evaluation frameworks that include operational metrics alongside network KPIs. Interoperability remains the most urgent priority, not just technical protocol compatibility, but the capacity for responders from different agencies and nations, arriving with different systems and no shared preparation, to achieve a common operational picture in real time.
The portfolio is strongest in the response phase; future work should engage more deliberately with prevention, recovery, post-incident learning, and community-level resilience. The governance and accountability dimensions of AI-driven systems, and the supply chain trustworthiness of critical components, deserve more systematic attention as design considerations from the outset. Digital literacy and public trust are conditions that determine whether technically capable systems produce the outcomes they are designed for and should be treated as research design inputs rather than downstream considerations.
Translating the portfolio’s technical foundations into societal impact requires deliberate, coordinated action across the research community, policymakers, practitioners, standardisation bodies, and industry. Making research evidence available in forms that policy and standardisation audiences can use and engaging actively with the processes that will determine whether research outputs are ever deployed at scale, is one of the most consequential contributions the programme can make. The goal is not technically impressive demonstrations but operationally validated, governance-ready, and universally accessible capabilities that European PPDR agencies, and the communities they serve, can actually depend on.
Petersen, K., Lund, D., Trevlakis, S. E., Pereira, A., Maliatsos, K., Politi, C. (Tanya) ., & Papaioannou, P. (2026). Smart Networks and Services Innovation to Support Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR). Zenodo.