Читать книгу Shaping Future 6G Networks - Группа авторов - Страница 19

5G is already a software‐based end‐to‐end communication system, allowing the addition of new access and backhaul networks as well as new control and management functionalities and virtual network functions (VNFs). So, should the industry start building a new generation instead of perfecting the existing one? It is likely that similar to previous even network generations (i.e. 2G and 4G), which perfected preceding network generations, 6G will finally deliver what was promised years ago for 5G. Many research topics currently performed in the context of 5G evolution will also pave the way toward 6G. Therefore, most researchers may consider the need for 5G evolution as the driving force toward 6G. In fact, at the end of the decade, which represents the typical life span of a mobile generation to deliver innovations, 5G may have become an open extensible and customizable communications platform, representing a toolbox to build public as well as private mobile communication networks for any kind of vertical application domain.

While it might be realistic to assume that 6G will be an evolution of 5G, there are also voices who propose that 6G should be much more disruptive and revolutionary, due to the exploitation of new enabling technologies. New concepts like the post‐Shannon theory and the use of emerging quantum computing technologies are just two examples of this line of thinking. To provide a scientific look beyond the rim, we address one of these topics at the end of the book (Chapter 16).

Moreover, while defining a new generation of cellular system every 10 years has a lot of advantages, as it enables deployment of a consistent set of features and technologies where all elements have been designed and packaged to work together, this model comes with a major drawback: the various components and technologies are tightly linked. It is therefore difficult to redesign one piece of the puzzle without touching the others. In a world being eaten by software, this may appear a bit old‐fashioned, as modern software engineering relies on decomposing systems into loosely coupled entities. So, 6G could also be the opportunity to extend 5G into an even more modular framework where various parties can more easily add different components, keeping in mind the necessary trade‐off among openness, reliability, and security, in order to achieve a highly trustworthy architecture. This would imply breaking or at least weakening the link between the radio access part and the core network part in the definition of this new generation, inspired perhaps by the idea of other wireless technologies, relying on unlicensed spectrums, such as Wi‐Fi and LoRaWAN. Finally, 6G is also an opportunity to continue decreasing operational costs, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to extend automated network planning, deployment, and operation; the ultimate target being to enable real self‐organizing networks.