Conference Workshop: CHALLENGES OF OPTICAL COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 6G ERA: A VIEW FROM EU PROJECTS Gergely Pongracz, Technical coordinator of D6G represents the project. DESIRE6G is designing and developing novel zero-touch control, management, and orchestration platform, with native integration of AI, to support eXtreme URLLC application requirements. DESIRE6G is re-architecting mobile networks through a) its intent-based control and end-to-end orchestration that targets to achieve near real time autonomic networking; and b) a cloud-native unified programmable data plane layer supporting multi-tenancy. The DESIRE6G data, control, management, and orchestration plane is supported by a pervasive monitoring system, extending from the network to the user equipment or IoT terminal. DESIRE6G employs distributed ledger technology to support a) dynamic federation for services across of multiple administrative domains and b) infrastructure-agnostic software security.