Programmability for Flexible 6G Architecture

The proliferation of the use cases expected to be supported by 6G networks and the diversity of requirements associated with these use cases call for a dynamically adaptable 6G network architecture. The recent advances in network programmability technologies such as SDN, P4, and NFV offer a rich tool suite to design flexible and programmable networks. In this paper, we propose a framework for end-to-end programmability management for 6G networks that covers different network domains. We show how the framework can be integrated with state-of-the-art network management. The benefits of this programmability management framework are highlighted by show-casing two novel use cases that utilize network programmability in the transport and UE domains. The first application utilizes P4 language to program transport domain switches to enhance performance measurements and enable adaptive QoS handling, while the second use case describes how UE programmability facilitates dynamic compute offloading between UEs and Multi-Access Edge Computing resources.