First Hexa-X Deliverable on '6G Vision, use cases and key societal values'

EU’s 6G project, Hexa-X, announced the submission of first deliverable D1.1, titled, '6G Vision, use cases and key societal values'.

The Abstract of the report says: "This report describes the initial 6G Hexa-X vision including first use cases, services, and key value indicator aspects. It will guide the work in the project and will be disseminated globally. This vision will be periodically updated and evolved during the project. The content is based on the following activities: analysis of current trends in society and technology, creation and tuning of the underlying vision, and identification of relevant principles impacting business models.

The Executive Summary provides the motivation for this report: 

Major societal and economic trends are analyzed one by one to help to guide research and design for human-centered communication networks in the 2030s. In addition, regulatory and technological trends are critical for the design and deployment of future networks of the 6G era and those are discussed. The 6G Hexa-X vision is to connect the worlds and revolves around their interaction: a human world of our senses, bodies, intelligence, and values; a digital world of information, communication and computing; and a physical world of objects and organisms. The vision has three core values setting the ambitions for the new interactions enabled by 6G: trustworthiness as a backbone of society; digital inclusiveness to connect the unconnected; and sustainability to make the largest possible impact with sustainable global development goals such as energy efficiency and minimum CO2 footprint. Six main research challenges were identified as integral parts of the 6G Hexa-X vision: connecting intelligence, network of networks (e.g., millions of (specialized) subnetworks), sustainability, global service coverage, extreme experience, and trustworthiness. The relevant principles that impact the business of 6G are identified as part of the vision: the convergence of data, connectivity and local special purpose platforms; new business ecosystems and stakeholders; sustainable ecosystemic platform business models; alternative future business scenarios; and telecommunication and vertical-specific regulations (such as medical regulations). 

An initial set of novel use cases envisioned for the 6G era are described including their connection to the 6G Hexa-X vision. The ambition and methodology are presented, as well as a review of the state-of-the-art and existing work on use cases for 6G. Families of use cases are identified and described: sustainable development, massive twinning, tele-presence, robots to cobots, and local trust zones. Each family of use cases addresses several of the six research challenges. The set of use cases described in each of the use case families is representative of envisioned trends for the usage of 6G, but is not meant to be exhaustive and will be enriched throughout the project. An additional family is outlined, including use case enabling services. These services will enable the realization of the use cases identified in the project, and possibly new ones. 

The novel concept of Key Value Indicators (KVIs) capturing trustworthiness, inclusiveness and sustainability of 6G on the one hand and 6G as an enabler for sustainability on the other hand is introduced and the effect of the key enabling technologies on value creation for products, services, and society is described. The state of the art on performance and value indicators is reported and research challenges for 6G are outlined across four dimensions: the evolution of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to address new use cases, the revolution of new End-to-End (E2E) measures, the need to capture new network capabilities, and the definition of meaningful and measurable KVIs to cover the aforementioned aspects. 

The work concludes with an outlook on planned next steps.

The report is available here.

Related Posts:

Comments