An Innovative Architectural Blueprint Towards Sustainable 6G Systems

The sixth generation (6G) era aims to push the capabilities of networks towards unprecedented frontiers, while ensuring sustainable design, development, and operation. Motivated by this, this work presents a sustainability-oriented 6G architecture and examines the trends in society, economy, environment, regulations, and technology. The envisioned architecture integrates intelligent, adaptable, energy efficient, transparent and secure elements, while its technology enablers, such as large language models, explainable artificial intelligence, semantic communications, digital twins, human-in-the-loop, blockchain, post-quantum communications, etc. are identified and analyzed. The role of each enabler is clarified. Taking sustainability aspects into consideration from the initial stages of the design process can be the deciding factor for the success or failure of environmentally conscious ecosystems.