Self-Sustaining Enabled User-Centric 6G Framework With Intelligence: Network-in-Cloud

With the ongoing development of artificial intelligence (AI) and wireless network technologies, the future network shifts from connecting everything to connected intelligence in the interaction between the human, physical, and digital worlds. The sixth generation (6G) networks are envisioned to deeply integrate new multidimensional capabilities such as communication, computing, sensing, AI and security to ensure users’ personalized service quality experience for innovative applications, calling for innovative architectures and new solutions. A key issue is rethinking how future networks will be designed, deployed, and managed. In this paper, we provide a prospective vision of trends, use cases, principles for the 6G network and the key enabling technologies for realizing future networks. In this regard, we first present the system-level perspective on 6G scenarios and characterize the diversified requirements. Then, the key principles for the 6G network architecture are addressed. Particularly, based on advanced flexibility and agility, a cloud-native-enabled intelligent 6G network architecture for user-specific applications is initially proposed to support the critical challenges of increasingly heterogeneous networking paradigms, highly dynamic network environments, and providing diversified intelligent services with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. It is important that atomic 6G network functions in our framework are designed to be cloud-native friendly and efficiently managed by decoupling and refactoring multi-dimensional service capabilities. Finally, several potential 6G directions are highlighted that could drive the development of the cloud-native communication concept.