As part of the ongoing efforts under the ENSURE-6G Staff Exchange Programme, funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), Ms. Rashmi Ratnayake from University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, successfully completed a one-month research secondment (December 2025) at Telefónica Innovación Digital, Barcelona.
This secondment focused on exploring blockchain-based trust enhancement mechanisms for 6G telecommunications, with particular emphasis on telecom-specific blockchain deployments and secure, personalised Federated Learning (FL) in distributed and adversarial environments. The collaboration brought together academic and industry perspectives to examine how blockchain can support trust, transparency, accountability, and robustness in next-generation networked systems.
During the stay in Barcelona, Rashmi engaged in in-depth technical discussions with the Telefónica Research team on how blockchain infrastructures can be leveraged to strengthen trust in telecom ecosystems—ranging from data integrity and auditability to decentralised trust enforcement in learning-enabled network functions. A key aspect of the work was investigating how blockchain can complement Federated Learning architectures, particularly in scenarios where trust assumptions are weak and adversarial behaviour is a realistic concern.
Beyond technical insights, the secondment offered valuable exposure to industry-driven challenges and expectations, helping to shape potential extensions of Rashmi’s PhD research toward more applied, scalable, and impactful solutions for real-world 6G systems.
Rashmi would like to sincerely thank Dr. Ferran Diego Andilla, Dr. Filippo Vannella, and Francisco Álvarez Terribas from the Telefónica Research team for hosting her and fostering an open, collaborative, and intellectually stimulating research environment. She is also deeply grateful to her supervisors Prof. Liam Murphy and Prof. Madhusanka Liyanage, as well as the Network Softwarization and Security Labs (NetsLab) team at UCD, for their continued guidance, mentorship, and support throughout this secondment and her broader PhD journey.
This collaboration further reinforces the ENSURE-6G project’s commitment to industry–academia partnerships and to advancing secure, trustworthy, and intelligent 6G infrastructures through international knowledge exchange and interdisciplinary research.
