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The 5G Infrastructure Association European Vision for the 6G Network Ecosystem Date: 2021-06-07 Version: 1.0European Vision for the 6G Ecosystem Dissemination level: Public Page i Executive Summary In the coming decade, 6G will bring a new era in which billions of things, humans, and connected vehicles, robots and drones will generate Zettabytes of digital information. 6G will be dealing with more challenging applications, e.g., holographic telepresence and immersive communication, and meet far more stringent requirements. The 2030s could be remembered as the start of the age of broad use of personal mobile robotics. 6G is the mobile network generation that will help us tackle those challenges. 6G will likely be a self-contained ecosystem of artificial intelligence. It will progressively evolve from being human-centric to being both human- and machine-centric. 6G will bring a near-instant and unrestricted complete wireless connectivity. A new landscape will also emerge for the enterprises, as a result of the convergence that 6G will allow in the fields of connectivity, robotics, cloud and secure and trustworthy commerce. This will radically reshape the way enterprises operate. In short, 6G will be one of the basic foundations of human societies of the future. To enable a sustainable progress for society, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, it is crucial that 6G addresses effectively pressing societal needs, while delivering new functionalities. This (r)evolution must be in line with Europes primary societal values, in terms of e.g., privacy, security, transparency, and inclusiveness. Digital technologies are also becoming a critical and essential means of ensuring countries sovereignty. The development of Europe- based 6G infrastructures and solutions is one of the keys to secure European sovereignty in critical technologies and systems. The convergence of 6G with operation technologies raises the prospect of disassociating the location of manufacturing, industrial equipment, assets, and processes, from the actual location of the human operators. This will introduce unprecedented changes in our way of life as it is likely to redistribute the existing balance between urban and rural areas, potentially redefining the role of cities, by reversing the urbanisation trend. The COVID-19 pandemic has already amplified the social and economic significance of ICT infrastructure, in terms of e-working, e-commerce, and e-health. End-user engagement will be increasingly important for a smooth acceptance of new technologies like 6G. To ensure that 6G can be inclusive for all people across the world, it needs to be affordable and scalable, with a great coverage everywhere. Key features of 6G will include intelligent connected management and control functions, programmability, integrated sensing and communication, reduction of energy footprint, trustworthy infrastructure, scalability, and affordability. The 6G architecture should be sufficiently flexible and efficient so as to enable easy integration of everything, i.e., a network of networks, joint communication and sensing, non-terrestrial networks and terrestrial communication, encompassing novel AI-powered enablers as well as local and distributed compute capabilities. The use of AI everywhere in the network, where it can be beneficial, i.e., the “AI everywhere” principle, will be used to enhance network performance and to provide AI-as-a-Service in a federated network. AI and Machine Learning will help to maintain operation cost-effectiveness of envisioned complex 6G services, such as the interaction on human-digital-physical worlds and Internet of Senses, to automate some level of decision- making processes, and to achieve a zero-touch approach. Several types of foundational technologies will drive the core development of 6G. Expanding network capacity to approach or even to try and go beyond the Shannons and Moores limits will be required for radio themes. Smart optical transport connectivity will allow the network to be always available, intrinsically secure, green, and with flexible scaling. Advances in photonicEuropean Vision for the 6G Ecosystem Dissemination level: Public Page ii integration will pave the way for a raft of new IT and networking devices in which optical, radio frequency, and digital electronic functions, can be combined. Modern security and reliability paradigms (“security by design”), as well as the application of modern software technology, will guarantee the dependability and trustworthiness of the system. New electronic technologies, components and devices, including processors, memories, analogue, radio frequency, digital access and cross-connect systems and analogue to digital converters antennas, packaging and optical components, will be required. The exploitation of properties from quantum mechanics needs to be explored to understand their potential for unprecedented performance in quantum sensing, communication, security, and computing. Recommendations Europes goal shall be to ensure leadership in strategic areas and find alternate ways of establishing a secure and trusted access to those technologies, where a European supply network cannot be established. Such an approach would create business opportunities by making Europe a sovereign, independent, and reliable source for 6G public and private network solutions and services. Public and private R unfortunately, that figure tends to grow in light of the ever-growing demand of new and enhanced services. Therefore, 6G needs to be designed even more as an energy optimized system including smart solutions (i.e., integrating AI to achieve optimizations), less energy demanding new radio technologies, as well as business models that foster energy efficiency. In parallel, it is also important to stress that the evolution of 5G beyond the 3GPP Release 18 and especially 6G will have an even more important role in enabling services that will lead to a more sustainable future. It can be envisaged that a system, to be qualified as 6G, will need to operate in a way that is compliant with strict sustainability criteria; this may create opportunities for new certification procedures. At each new generation, communication systems get more powerful and complex, thus calling for larger financial investments to deploy and operate them 2-13. Therefore, to attain appropriate Return on Investment (ROI), new systems like 6G will be mostly directed to richer areas, and in the mid-term this trend can be detrimental from the societal and financial viewpoints. Such an example is the constant upgrade of the investments in urban areas, compared to the lower volume of investment done in less-densely populated, sub-urban and rural ones; this trend, experienced whenever a new system, e.g., 4G and 5G, is launched, hinders the deployment of new services, in addition to the widening of inequalities. In this respect, 6G should be created to encompass efficient solutions, suitable for various environments and situations. This will foster inclusion and contribute towards the reduction of the (currently growing) digital divide. Moreover, the convergence of 6G, an integral part of ICT, with operation technologies (OT) raises the prospect of disassociating the location of manufacturing, industrial equipment, assets, and processes, from the actual location of the human operators. This will introduce unprecedented changes in our way of life as it will redistribute the existing balance between urban and rural areas, potentially redefining the role of cities by reversing the urbanization trend. Furthermore, as systems evolve into more and more intelligent, powerful, and dynamic ones, trust on those systems becomes more and more crucial. In the context of network design, trust is not only associated with security (e.g., the procedures of authentication, authorization, non- repudiation), but also relies on further aspects, namely, functional criteria (e.g., the behaviour of the system and the way it manages data), and non-functional criteria (e.g., the performance, the resource consumption and the costs of deployment and operation). Indeed, an important systemEuropean Vision for the 6G Ecosystem Dissemination level: Public Page 5 component and key enabling technology of our times is AI. Trustworthy AI can be an essential factor that will lead to a 6G infrastructure that can be trusted. This opens new streams for research and development, for embedding new capabilities into 6G infrastructures. Currently, there is a trend of rising open marketplaces hosted on hyper-scale internet-based retail platforms, which leads to the decline of revenues in highstreet retail that is mainly based on physical presence and customer visitation. Such a trend is further accelerated during COVID-19 pandemic and by the lockdown restrictions which may cause death of the highstreet if no countermeasure is taken. To stay competitive highstreets are therefore moving into the cyber- physical domain, with the target of evolving into an immersive and quality of life enhancing environment, holding consumers in a mixed retail, catering, and entertainment like highstreet of the future, e.g., the planned NEOM future city 2-14. 6G is expected to provide cost-efficient and effective means to achieve that target. To support those developments, it is of utmost importance to train the looked-for workforce with core skills on Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM). In addition, 6G is expected to require broader and cross-fields knowledge and therefore successful innovations will also benefit from diversity of thoughts, thus leading to an increased emphasis in Social Sciences and Arts related skills to be added to the traditional STEM ones. The recent announcement of a 4G system being commissioned for utilisation on the Moon hints towards the new frontiers into which communications systems may emerge 2-15. Communications to satellites and the International Space Station (ISS) are being commoditised as more and more private industrial players enter, whilst travels to Moon and Mars are gaining again attention. 6G should therefore offer key architectural concepts and spectrum capabilities that can enable network deployments beyond the GEO systems of today. Greater engagement from bodies like the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in specifying global standards can be anticipated in the 6G era. 2.3 Policy context “In the 21 st century, those who control digital technologies are increasingly able to influence economic, societal and political outcomes” 2-16. Global policy makers more and more consider digital technologies as critical and essential means for the autonomy of their countries and as the foundation of countries sovereignty. In the continuously evolving geopolitical context, the EU is updating its political and industry strategy with respect to digital technologies and seeks to bolster its digital sovereignty that rests on three pillars: computing power, control over data and secure connectivity 2-172-18. The target is neither to seek total independence nor to isolate the EU from other parts of the world, rather to develop strong European technology offers and alternatives that meet European political interests and values, as well as economic and societal goals. A central key is then to develop secure infrastructures such as 6G and to secure European sovereignty in critical technologies and systems in next decades 2-19. The EU is currently in a privileged position regarding communication networks, as it hosts two out of the four major telecommunication vendors and three global satellite operators, meanwhile European companies own over one quarter of essential patents related to the 5G standard as of 2019 2-202-21. Such global leadership position is however under threat amid rising concerns on security and supply chain disruption as stressed by the COVID-19 outbreak. In particular, the EU is currently lagging in terms of cloud platforms, end devices microelectronics, and photonics in the communications domain 2-20 and therefore cannotEuropean Vision for the 6G Ecosystem Dissemination level: Public Page 6 currently fully provide on its own end-to-end solutions. Despite of presence of strong telecommunication players, the EU only holds 3.5% of the global electronics production in this market. This may be attributed to the absence of a strong fabless ecosystem and the lack of design capabilities and fabrication technology leadership in very advanced CMOS processes, i.e., technology nodes below 10 nm. 6G is strategically important to European technological sovereignty in the coming years, and pure market dynamics may need to be complemented by a set of actions steered by a European industrial policy 2-22. The joint declaration by EU member states in December 2020 on a European initiative on processors and semiconductor technologies (EPI) 2-23, and the recently announced GAIA-X A federated data infrastructure for Europe initiative 2-24 are very recent first and promising steps towards that direction. The EU develops, within a certain framework (e.g., legal, social), products, systems and services which are built to operate according to its set values 2-25. The EU has a deep-rooted tradition in developing wireless systems and will continue being a big market for such technologies moving towards 6G. In the light of these aspects, it is important to make sure that the EU will interact with other areas of the world, promoting the adoption of its values, from the perspective of both the society and the environment, and for guaranteeing a level playing field, in which all human beings can hope for a better future. 2.4 Business Defining the enterprise of the future and understanding the way it interacts with 6G is critical for an efficient value creation. A new landscape will emerge for the enterprises as a result of the convergence that 6G will allow in the fields of connectivity, robotics, intelligent transport systems, cloud, and secure commerce and trust, which will tune-up with new community collaboration approaches to create new and agile business models. 6G is the catalyst and the central means of this looked-for convergence which will radically reshape the way enterprises operate and make business. So far, digitization has primarily affected the activities that act as prerequisites or are complementary to the actual production, e.g., the workers in front of a computer at a desk. The aforementioned ICT and OT convergence fostered by 6G will lead to the emergence of prosumers, while the remote connection and remote interaction will allow for a broad implementation of the deskless workers concept for the benefit of several verticals. Such workers will carry out their tasks by means of new digital tools or apparatuses which will enable them to perform their activities asynchronously, i.e., the
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