Organic 6G Networks: Vision, Requirements, and Research Approaches

Building upon the significant number of already published 6G position papers, we are concentrating on the immediate next steps toward turning the research vision of software-centric networks into reality. This is accomplished, by summarizing and assessing the various requirements documents and providing a significant number of specific research directions and approaches in order to fulfill them. This article complements the existing body of work, by focusing on future core networks and their infrastructures, yet maintaining a system level perspective and progressing in the direction of scoping key technology elements and providing high-potential research approaches for them. Additionally, we rigorously discuss the impact different technological advancements have on the other parts of the system, so as to provide a coherent, end-to-end network understanding. This is in strong contrast to current approaches where from the challenges, each research direction becomes independent and thus, its advances are cancelled out by the next technology in the chain. By maintaining this system perspective, the adoption of the different technologies becomes easier, as they are developed in unison. To address the requirements in a coherent, holistic and unified way, we introduce the high-level architecture concept named “Organic 6G Networks”. A holistic software-centric system, adapting the latest software development advancements from the IT industry. The Organic 6G network provides the support for building a streamlined software network architecture and to provide a next development and specification step for future mobile networks.