A Data-Driven Distributed Autonomous Architecture Towards 6G Network

Driven by the technology innovation, service diversification, and the evolution and defects of current networks, the 6th generation (6G) network architecture is starved for research. One of the challenges is that the architecture design should take into account multiple factors of customers, operators, and vendors. For service-oriented and network-oriented design requirements, this article proposes a data-driven distributed autonomous architecture towards 6G with three-layer-four-plane logical hierarchy. The architecture is simplified as four network function units and the interactions among which are carried on the dual-bus interfaces, i.e., service-based interface and data channel interface. In addition, it takes user data-centric as the fundamental principle and rendered as distributed autonomous domains with different scales to better adapt to customized services. We further provide the network simplification evaluation by going through several signaling procedures of the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP), inspiring the advanced research and subsequent standardization of 6G network architecture.