Architecture landscape

The network architecture evolution journey will carry on in the years ahead, driving a large scale adoption of 5th Generation (5G) and 5G-Advanced use cases with significantly decreased deployment and operational costs, and enabling new and innovative use-case-driven solutions towards 6th Generation (6G) with higher economic and societal values. The goal of this chapter, thus, is to present the envisioned societal impact, use cases and the End-to-End (E2E) 6G architecture. The E2E 6G architecture includes summarization of the various technical enablers as well as the system and functional views of the architecture

6G E2E Architecture Framework with Sustainability and Security Considerations

The research on 6G in the EU-funded flagship project Hexa-X started with the investigation of the most important technology enablers and the evaluation of relevant 6G use cases. The next step is to integrate these enablers in a 6G E2E architecture that fulfills all use case-based Key Performance (KPI) and Key Value Indicators (KVI) and that follows the guidelines of general architectural principles. In addition, the main focus of an E2E 6G architecture must be on security and sustainability which both will have increased importance for future communication networks and society

Setting 6G Architecture in Motion - the Hexa-X Approach

The most recent cellular generation, 5G, is being deployed on a large scale globally. The capabilities of 5G surpass all previous generations of cellular networks and support many new services compared to 4G. Despite this, at the same time, preparations for 6G have begun since user demands and technical development continuously push the boundaries of what is possible. Demands come not only from users. Also, society sets requirements, e.g., sustainability, coverage, and privacy. To support the necessary features in the network needed to meet the requirements, a new generation of the architecture is needed; one based on the most forward-looking design principles together with trends in networks, use cases, and whatnot. To show that the proposed new features will allow the future network to meet the set requirements, key performance indicators (KPIs) have to be defined. In this paper, we present six of the KPIs that the European 6G flagship project Hexa-X has identified as the fundamental ones to measure the most important aspects of a new 6G architecture