From Demonstrations to Collaboration: ELASTIC at EuCNC & 6G Summit 2026

EuCNC & 6G Summit · Málaga, 2–5 June 2026

Three and a half days, one booth, ten people — and a lot of conversations about the future of secure, portable, and efficient network services

The ELASTIC team headed to Málaga for EuCNC 2026, and came back with new collaborations, new contacts, technical progress, and plenty of reasons to be proud of what we’ve been building.

EuCNC is one of those conferences where the hallway conversations matter as much as the sessions themselves. This year, the ELASTIC project had a front-row seat to all of it — with a dedicated booth in the exhibition hall, two workshop contributions, and a team that threw itself fully into three and a half packed days of demos, debates, technical work sessions, and (we’ll admit it) some well-deserved team dinners in the Málaga evenings.

Ten of us made the trip: Sotiris Ioannidis, Despina Kopanaki, Dhouha Ayed, Drasko Draskovic, Rajat Kandoi, Dušan Borovčanin, Davide Miola, Ana Kovacevic, Louis Cailliot, and Joonas Björk — representing Technical University of Crete, Thales Six, Abstract Machines, Ericsson Finland, Ultraviolet, Politecnico di Torino, and Zentrix Labs. Different organisations, different time zones in normal life, but unmistakably one team when you saw us at Booth #76.

At the booth

Over the three and a half days, more than 100 people stopped by to see what ELASTIC is about. Some already knew the project well; many discovered us for the first time. The booth table itself set the tone from the start: stacks of the dark-covered ELASTIC project booklet and the teal component booklets, yo-yos, luggage tags, pens, and “Become an ELASTIC Contact Point” cards — a neat invitation to stay engaged with the project after the conference. It sounds like a small thing, but a well-dressed booth signals care, and visitors notice.

The ELASTIC component booklet is openly available on Zenodo: ZENODO_LINK

What they found beyond the table was a live showcase of some genuinely exciting technology: our demonstrators running in real time, showing how WebAssembly-isolated workloads can be deployed across heterogeneous edge-cloud environments with low overhead and strong security guarantees. There is something particular about being able to show rather than just tell. When you can run a live demo and let someone interact with a system that deploys a Wasm-isolated workload in seconds, the abstract concepts in a slide deck suddenly become very real. That was the energy at the booth throughout the event — curiosity turning into concrete interest, and concrete interest turning into follow-up conversations we are already building on.

Alongside the demos and the booklets, the conversations themselves were the real highlight. Deep technical dives with researchers curious about confidential computing, federated learning, and eBPF observability. Exploratory chats with industry engineers asking hard questions about real deployment scenarios. The scenarios that resonated most were predictive maintenance, cross-factory data sharing, and privacy-preserving cloud migration — exactly the kinds of real-world challenges ELASTIC was designed to address. Visitors came from academia and industry alike, with institutions including Huawei, Siemens AG, and universities from across Europe among those who engaged most deeply with the work.

A particularly special moment came when we had the honour of welcoming our new Project Officer, Christina Apostolaki, to the booth. Together with Pavlos Fournogerakis, Deputy Head of Programmes at SNS JU, the team walked them through the project and gave a live presentation of both demonstrators. Having the people responsible for the programme see the work up close — and in action — was a meaningful milestone for the whole consortium.

On the workshop stage

The team didn’t just staff the booth — ELASTIC was visible in the programme too. On Tuesday morning, our technical coordinator Dr Dhouha Ayed took the stage at Workshop 5 on Security for 6G Networks, which she co-organises as co-chair of the 6G-IA Security Working Group alongside Antonio Skarmeta from the University of Murcia. Together with Rajat Kandoi — who leads ELASTIC’s Demonstrator 1 from Ericsson Finland — presented the project’s work on orchestrating confidential workloads across the edge-cloud continuum.

Their talk went to the heart of what makes ELASTIC distinctive: a privacy-preserving, architecture-agnostic execution environment that doesn’t ask you to choose between security and performance. By combining confidential computing, privacy-enhancing technologies, and Wasm-isolated containers, the approach delivers fast deployment, low bandwidth requirements, and genuine trust guarantees — even when multiple infrastructure providers and tenants are involved in hosting and orchestrating the same network service. The room was engaged, the questions were sharp, and it was a strong moment for the project on one of the most relevant stages of the week.

Later the same afternoon, ELASTIC was cited as a contributing project in the workshop on bridging research, software and standards for AI-native networks. In a session covering AI/MLOps as a foundational enabler for 6G — touching on distributed and decentralised AI/ML workload management, ML experimentation, and the automation of combined ML and data operations — ELASTIC was recognised alongside projects including 6G-DALI, 6GCLOUD, UNITY-6G, 6G-XCEL and ADROIT-6G. Good company to be in, and a reflection of where ELASTIC’s work sits within the broader AI-native 6G landscape.

Working sessions and team time

EuCNC was not only an opportunity to face outward — it was equally valuable as a moment to work together. With so many consortium members in the same place at the same time, the team made the most of it: structured working sessions alongside the conference programme allowed us to make real progress on technical topics that are harder to advance asynchronously across time zones and organisations. Having everyone physically present, able to sketch, debate, and decide in real time, has a quality that no video call can fully replicate.

The evenings were a different kind of valuable. Shared dinners in Málaga gave the team the chance to step back from the intensity of the conference floor and simply be together — conversations that ranged from deeply technical to entirely off-topic, and all the better for it. A consortium that knows each other as people, not just as names on a call, works better. Málaga reminded us of that.

New connections, deeper collaborations

Some of the most valuable outcomes of a conference like EuCNC don’t happen on stage — they happen in the margins. One of the quieter but genuinely meaningful threads of the event was the deepening of our relationship with the SAFE-6G project. Conversations there moved well beyond pleasantries and into concrete alignment around trustworthiness in 6G networks. The two projects are now looking ahead to co-organising the ATHENA workshop together, and the foundations laid in Málaga give us a strong basis to build on.

EuCNC also gave us the opportunity to continue and significantly deepen discussions with the 6G-PATH project. Building on a joint webinar earlier in the year, Drasko Draskovic and colleagues engaged in extensive exchanges with the 6G-PATH team around two initiatives that sit squarely at the intersection of both projects’ interests: MIRO and Propeller orchestrators. These conversations went far beyond a catch-up — they were substantive, forward-looking, and point towards the kind of cross-project collaboration that has real potential to shape outcomes in the wider 6G ecosystem. More to follow on that front in the coming months.

Taken together, the connections made and renewed in Málaga — with SAFE-6G, with 6G-PATH, and with the many researchers and engineers who visited the booth — are a significant part of what we’ll be carrying forward from EuCNC 2026.

EuCNC 2026 was a reminder of why showing up in person still matters. The technology speaks for itself in a demo — but it’s the conversations, the whiteboard sketches, the working sessions, and the dinners that turn a project consortium into a team. We’ll be building on everything that started in Málaga over the months ahead!