The sixth generation (6G) mobile communication networks are expected to intelligently integrate into various aspects of modern digital society, including smart cities, homes, health-care, transportation, and factories. While offering a multitude of services, it is likely that societies become increasingly reliant on 6G infrastructure. Any disruption to these digital services, whether due to human or technical failures, natural disasters, or terrorism, would significantly impact citizens’ daily lives. Hence, 6G networks need not only to provide high-performance services but also to be resilient in maintaining essential services in the face of potentially unknown challenges. This paper provides a general review of the state of the art on resilient systems, definitions, concepts, and approaches. Moreover, it introduces a comprehensive concept, i.e., resilience-by-design (RBD), in three different levels for designing resilient 6G communication networks, summarizing our initial studies within the German Open6GHub project. First, we outline the general RBD enabling principles and discuss their related sub-categories. Next, adopting an interdisciplinary approach, we propose to embed these principles across all 6G layers/perspectives including electronics, physical channel, network components and functions, networks, services, and cross-layer and cross-infrastructure considerations and discuss their challenges. We further elaborate the RBD principles and their realizations along with several 6G use-cases. The paper is concluded by presenting a comprehensive list of open problems for future research on 6G resilience.

Building upon the significant number of already published 6G position papers, we are concentrating on the immediate next steps toward turning the research vision of software-centric networks into reality. This is accomplished, by summarizing and assessing the various requirements documents and providing a significant number of specific research directions and approaches in order to fulfill them. This article complements the existing body of work, by focusing on future core networks and their infrastructures, yet maintaining a system level perspective and progressing in the direction of scoping key technology elements and providing high-potential research approaches for them. Additionally, we rigorously discuss the impact different technological advancements have on the other parts of the system, so as to provide a coherent, end-to-end network understanding. This is in strong contrast to current approaches where from the challenges, each research direction becomes independent and thus, its advances are cancelled out by the next technology in the chain. By maintaining this system perspective, the adoption of the different technologies becomes easier, as they are developed in unison. To address the requirements in a coherent, holistic and unified way, we introduce the high-level architecture concept named “Organic 6G Networks”. A holistic software-centric system, adapting the latest software development advancements from the IT industry. The Organic 6G network provides the support for building a streamlined software network architecture and to provide a next development and specification step for future mobile networks.

International audienceThis paper presents a platform for virtual network (VN) provisioning across multiple domains. The platform decomposes VN provisioning into multiple steps to address the implications of limited information disclosure on resource discovery and allocation. A new VN embedding algorithm with simultaneous node and link mapping allows to assign resources within each domain. For inter-domain virtual link setup, we design and realize a signaling protocol that also integrates resource reservations for providing virtual links with Quality-of-Service guarantees. Experimental results show that small VNs can be provisioned within a few seconds

End-to-End connectivity in today's Internet can no longer be taken for granted. Middleboxes, mobility, and protocol heterogeneity complicate application development and often result in application-specific solutions. In our demo we present ariba: an overlay-based approach to handle such network challenges and to provide consistent homogeneous network primitives in order to ease application and service development.

Many technical systems of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector enable, structure and/or constrain social interactions. Thereby, they influence or implement certain values, including human rights, and affect or raise conflicts among values. The ongoing developments toward an "Internet of everything'' is likely to lead to further value conflicts. This trend illustrates that a better understanding of the relationships between social values and networks is urgently needed because it is largely unknown what values lie behind protocols, design principles, or technical and organizational options of the Internet. This paper focuses on the complex steps of realizing human rights in Internet architectures and protocols as well as in Internet-based products and services. Besides direct implementation of values in Internet protocols, there are several other options that can indirectly contribute to realizing human rights via political processes and market choices. Eventually, a better understanding of what values can be realized by networks in general, what technical measures may affect certain values, and where complementary institutional developments are needed may lead toward a methodology for considering technical and institutional systems together.

The next generation of wireless mobile networks will be driven by software and infrastructure virtualization. At the same time, the underlying hardware will become more diverse. Edge, intermediate and central network nodes will allow distributed deployments of never seen before scale. Non-terrestrial networks, nomadic networks and networks in networks promise more dynamicity, changing their topologies over time in predictable and unpredictable ways. To handle the complexity and dynamicity, a highly flexible and adaptable network is required. The key enablers of this complex digital communication system will be programmable infrastructures. From programmable access and flexible backhauls to zero-touch, adaptable and resilient control planes, we conducted research into advanced programmability at different layers of the network, within the Open6GHub project. In this article, we present innovative solutions for advanced programmable network infrastructure and show why they are essential for our vision of the programmable infrastructure of future wireless mobile networks.