Insights from the 6G Flagship's 6G Resilience Summit and White Paper

Resilience has steadily moved from being an implicit expectation of mobile networks to a first order design objective. This shift was placed firmly at the centre of discussion during the first 6G Resilience Summit, held in Oulu in November 2025, alongside the release of the 6G Flagship’s 15th whitepaper in the 6G Research Visions series. Together, the summit and the white paper frame resilience not as an operational add on, but as a foundational requirement for future wireless systems.

Mobile networks now underpin essential societal functions across healthcare, transportation, energy, manufacturing and public safety. As connectivity becomes deeply embedded into critical infrastructure, failures no longer remain isolated technical events. Localised disruptions can propagate across sectors, triggering cascading effects that impact services far beyond the communications domain. The white paper positions 6G as an opportunity to rethink how wireless systems are designed, deployed and managed in order to better withstand, adapt to and recover from such disruptions.

A key theme emerging from both the summit and the white paper is the need to move beyond traditional performance centric metrics. Previous generations have prioritised throughput, latency and spectral efficiency, often assuming relatively stable operating conditions. In contrast, 6G must be capable of operating under prolonged stress, partial failures and highly dynamic environments. Resilience therefore sits alongside efficiency and sustainability as a core design pillar, rather than competing with them as an afterthought.

The white paper formalises resilience as a dynamic, runtime property of wireless systems. It distinguishes resilience from related concepts such as reliability and robustness, which typically focus on preventing failures or withstanding anticipated disturbances. Resilience instead assumes that failures are inevitable. The objective becomes maintaining essential functionality, enabling graceful degradation, and supporting rapid recovery and long term adaptation. This perspective is particularly relevant as networks evolve towards distributed, software driven and highly programmable architectures.

Architecturally, the paper highlights the importance of edge native and locality aware designs. By pushing compute, control and intelligence closer to where services are consumed, networks can continue operating even when centralised components or backhaul connectivity are compromised. Support for islanded operation, fallback modes and multi layer diversity across radio, compute, energy and timing domains is seen as critical for sustaining services during disruptions. Open interfaces and programmability further enable flexible reconfiguration as conditions change.

Artificial intelligence plays a central role in enabling these capabilities. Rather than being limited to offline optimisation, AI is positioned as an integral part of the control loop, supporting situational awareness, anomaly detection, prediction and autonomous recovery. The white paper places particular emphasis on distributed and agent based AI approaches, which are better suited to decentralised environments and resource constrained scenarios. These approaches also help avoid excessive centralisation, which can itself become a source of fragility.

Security and trust are treated as inseparable from resilience. The evolving threat landscape for 6G includes not only cyber attacks but also supply chain vulnerabilities and cross domain dependencies. Zero trust principles rooted in hardware based trust anchors and verifiable behaviour are proposed as essential enablers. Rather than aiming for absolute protection, the focus is on ensuring that networks can continue to deliver critical services even when parts of the system are compromised.

The white paper also explores the techno economic dimensions of resilience. Open platforms and rich ecosystems of complementors are seen as mechanisms for improving resilience while enabling new business opportunities. By reducing vendor lock in and encouraging interoperability, such ecosystems can limit systemic risk and improve the ability of networks to evolve over time. At the same time, the paper acknowledges the trade offs involved, particularly between redundancy, energy consumption and cost, and calls for new frameworks to evaluate these balances holistically.

Discussions at the 6G Resilience Summit reinforced the multidisciplinary nature of the challenge. Contributions from academia, industry and policymakers highlighted that resilience cannot be addressed solely within the communications domain. Dependencies on energy systems, positioning and timing infrastructure, cloud platforms and regulatory frameworks all influence how resilient future networks can be in practice. The summit format, with a single track and extended discussion periods, reflected the need for shared understanding across traditionally separate communities.

Looking ahead, the 6G Flagship positions resilience as a unifying theme for its next research phase. The ambition is not only to advance technical solutions, but also to integrate societal needs and long term sustainability considerations more tightly into technology development. As wireless systems continue to evolve into a critical backbone of digital society, their ability to endure disruption and continue serving essential functions will increasingly define their value.

The 6G Resilience Summit marked an important milestone in elevating resilience from a secondary concern to a central design goal for 6G. The accompanying white paper provides a structured technical foundation for this shift, outlining definitions, architectures, enabling technologies and research priorities. Together, they offer a clear signal that the future of mobile networks will be judged not only by how fast or efficient they are, but by how well they can adapt, recover and evolve under pressure.

A full video playlist from the 6G Resilience Summit is embedded below for those who would like to explore the discussions and presentations in more depth.

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