Shaping Future 6G Networks

Marco Giordani1, Michele Polese2, Andres Laya3, Emmanuel Bertin4, and Michele Zorzi1

1Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

2Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

3Ericsson Research, Stockholm, Sweden

4Orange Innovation, France

The 5th generation (5G) of wireless networks was positioned to support, besides the evolution of mobile broadband, new use cases ranging from massive IoT to ultrareliable services. However, in view of future technological innovations, researchers, industrial companies, and standardization bodies have started proposing new use cases and services that, for their generality and complementarity, would not be fully supported by 5G networks and are thus good representatives of future 6G services [1]. While the literature has a larger focus on application domains for the business‐to‐consumer (B2C) sector, this chapter discusses new beyond‐5G drivers for the business‐to‐business (B2B) markets, such as automotive, manufacturing and logistics, health and government, smart transportation, banking, and financial verticals.

Starting from the 5G‐identified verticals, we make the case that, among other services, 6G will (i) fully realize the industrial and manufacturing revolution started with 5G, i.e. the digital transition to a cyber physical facility ( Section 2.3.1); (ii) revolutionize business meetings and events by enabling the digitalization and transmission of human sensing and objects through teleportation and digital twins ( Sections 2.3.2and 2.3.3); (iii) support smart (and autonomous) transportation with important implications for the logistics and fleet management sectors ( Section 2.3.4); (iv) improve public safety (PS) networking for first responders ( Section 2.3.5); (v) transform the healthcare sector through remote intervertions and home care to guarantee the most efficient use of healthcare resources and support the reduction of management costs for health facilities ( Section 2.3.6); (vi) accelerate the adoption of solutions for digital services in cities, farming, and warehousing, targeting environmental monitoring, traffic control, and management automation ( Section 2.3.7); and (vii) revolutionize the financial sector by supporting novel banking operations and efficient high‐frequency trading (HFT) ( Section 2.3.8).

This chapter also discusses commonalities and differences among these drivers and outlines the order of magnitude of key performance indicators (KPIs) and requirements to be satisfied. In particular, while 5G‐based use cases typically present trade‐offs on latency, energy consumption, development and deployment costs, computational complexity, and throughput, 6G will be developed to meet stringent network demands in a holistic fashion, in view of the foreseen economic and business context of the 2030 era. Specifically, 6G paradigms will need to support (i) continuous connectivity, thus enabling coverage expansion compared to 5G in a cost‐efficient way to simultaneously reach high capacity, lower latency, and improved reliability; (ii) zero‐energy devices, e.g. for Internet of Things (IoT) and sensing applications for devices dispersed in wide areas for which replacing batteries will not be practical; and (iii) network‐compute integration to allow better predictions while maximizing performance in terms of latencies under 1 millisecond, low jitter, and high communication resilience.

First generations of mobile communication networks have mainly targeted the B2C market. Offers targeting the B2B market have been mostly limited to providing connectivity to enterprise employees and providing connectivity to manufactured objects. While the first one has been present since the beginning of mobile communications with resource management offers, the second one has appeared progressively with the rise of Machine‐to‐Machine (M2M) communications, e.g., for logistics and traceability purposes. However, these use cases used to be quite marginal in the mobile network operator business, which remained focused on delivering connectivity and providing communication means to the mass market.

5G has been a first move to complement the B2C model. The B2B market has been identified from the beginning as an important driver for 5G services, especially through ultra‐reliable low latency communications (URLLC) and massive machine type communication (mMTC) features. The deployment models of 5G have also been designed to fit enterprise needs. First, 5G standards enable the provision of end‐to‐end network slices targeting specific enterprise needs, covering both radio access network and core network. Second, some industry players are going further and have deployed their own 5G private networks, fully dedicated to their specific needs.

It is expected that 6G will amplify this trend, and that B2B market needs will be a strong driver towards 6G 1 . Our societies indeed rely more and more on digital services and on ambient connectivity. Until now, these digital services have been mainly provided by Internet players (i.e., platforms and content providers), while mobile network operators are providing connectivity to this Internet of services. However, when moving forward in the course of digitalization, social activities and business processes will be progressively transformed. Companies and public organizations will then become key players to implement and benefit from this transformation, and the future 6G requirements should therefore be driven by their pain points and use cases. This also implies a greater involvement of B2B verticals in the 6G standardization process, as outlined in the following chapters of this book.

In the 6G era, innovative mobile network operators will reap benefits from several business models simultaneously: besides selling connectivity services to end‐users, telecommunication operators will provide the required connectivity resources to B2B players (including companies, cities, public authorities, etc.) to fulfill their own missions. Connectivity solutions will need to be flexible enough to adapt to more and more heterogeneous Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, along the lines of what 5G is offering with network slicing. We illustrate this point in the following sections by providing relevant KPIs for the described use cases in the B2B market. 6G should therefore be an opportunity for industry players to invent and design new devices and networking strategies to support their own digital transformation needs of processes and social activities.

This section reviews the characteristics and requirements of envisioned 6G use cases for the B2B market, as summarized in Table 2.1.

Table 2.1 6G use cases for the B2B market.