6G Architecture to Connect the Worlds

TLDR

The post‑pandemic era presents opportunities and challenges to link physical, digital, and biological worlds, and 6G must adopt a new architecture to fully realize this vision. This work explores novel 6G architecture concepts decomposed into platform, functions, orchestration, and specialization components to enable the benefits of advanced radio technologies. The proposed architecture combines an open, scalable, elastic het‑cloud with micro‑services, serverless functions, specialized modules, and open orchestration, while integrating sub‑Terahertz spectrum, AI/ML‑optimized air interfaces, radio sensing, and extreme latency, reliability, and synchronization requirements.

Abstract

The post-pandemic future will offer tremendous opportunity and challenge from transformation of the human experience linking physical, digital and biological worlds: 6G should be based on a new architecture to fully realize the vision to connect the worlds. We explore several novel architecture concepts for the 6G era driven by a decomposition of the architecture into platform, functions, orchestration and specialization aspects. With 6G, we associate an open, scalable, elastic, and platform agnostic het-cloud, with converged applications and services decomposed into micro-services and serverless functions, specialized architecture for extreme attributes, as well as open service orchestration architecture. Key attributes and characteristics of the associated architectural scenarios are described. At the air-interface level, 6G is expected to encompass use of sub-Terahertz spectrum and new spectrum sharing technologies, air-interface design optimized by AI/ML techniques, integration of radio sensing with communication, and meeting extreme requirements on latency, reliability and synchronization. Fully realizing the benefits of these advances in radio technology will also call for innovations in 6G network architecture as described.