Читать книгу Shaping Future 6G Networks - Группа авторов - Страница 25

Beside the radio technologies, a new mobile network generation is also an opportunity to reframe the underlying mechanisms of access and core networks. Chapters 9 and 10 discuss new requirements to address by the network infrastructure (especially on the routing layer), as well as the various solutions to progress on a more optimized implementation. First, one of the major drivers and the foundation for network convergence, the Internet Protocol (IP) also represents a major legacy and limitation factor in communications. The design of 6G is also an opportunity to question this foundational layer 3 protocol, as has already been done for other layers (e.g. Quick UDP Internet Connections [QUIC] for layer 4), in order to solve some intrinsic limits, such as addressing scheme or security vulnerabilities. In Chapter 9, authors investigate options to renovate basic low‐level communication protocols to gain more efficiencies and flexibilities beyond the limits of the IP framework. Starting from some iconic application domains (e.g. holographic communication, Industry 4.0), they introduce future requirements for this new framework: high‐precision and deterministic services with the right quality of service (QoS) level, user‐defined network operations embedded in the packet delivery layer, semantic and flexible addressing, optimal support of various types of access technologies with a high throughput, and intrinsic security and privacy. These requirements should be used as a starting point to build innovative 6G protocol layers for both human‐oriented and machine‐oriented communications.

Then, as stated before, 5G has turned the mobile communications network into a pure software‐based system, exploiting the innovations of software‐defined networking and network function virtualization. In addition to cloud computing, which inspired new centralized service architectures, edge computing evolved as the new architectural principle to enable network function distribution for low‐latency communications and efficiency in network data processing. Chapter 10 proposes to go one step beyond in considering the network more as a distributed computer board than as a provider of pipes and forwarding mechanisms. Starting from the work on programmable networks (from active networks to software‐defined networking), the chapter introduces emerging concepts and requirements for the computerization of networks. While it breaks some established principles (e.g. end‐to‐end principle of the Internet or client‐server design), this enables to create a seamless core‐edge continuum of multiple independent components. Such continuum will require a programmable dataplane, relying on a common data layer. Potential application cases are, for example, the optimization of datacenter design, the next generation of IoT with intelligence everywhere, or computing support for networked AR/VR. We therefore believe 6G should be the opportunity to rethink the network as a programmable platform.