The 6th generation of wireless mobile networks is emerging as a paradigm shifting successor to unifying the experience across the physical, digital, and human worlds, pushing boundaries on performance in capacity, throughput, latency, scalability, flexibility, and reliability, while prominently addressing new major factors, including sustainability, security and privacy, as well as digital inclusion. Many research institutions and initiatives worldwide have started investigations to make 6G a reality by approximately 2030. In Germany, federal funding from the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) supports a large-scale 6G initiative, with its lighthouse project, called 6G-ANNA. The core aim of this project is to develop the key aspects of a holistic, sustainable, secure, and resilient 6G system design that will simplify and improve the interaction between humans, digital assets, and the physical environment. This paper shares the vision of the project’s main technical working areas and advances, spanning topics from radio access, integration of multiple networks, as well as automation and simplification in networking to new applications and testbed scenarios, including real-time digital twins and extended reality. The industrial impact and relevance of standardization makes 6G-ANNA uniquely positioned to lead and realize the vision of next-generation wireless mobile network technologies, systems, and applications.

The sixth generation (6G) of wireless networks is envisioned to achieve far beyond the capabilities of fifth generation (5G), necessitating significant innovations at the physical layer (PHY). These include exploration of several fundamental trade-offs between spectral efficiency, reliability, and energy consumption, and enhancing the performance of key enablers for 6G PHY. This paper synthesizes key insights from the 6G-ANNA research initiative on emerging PHY technologies for 6G to provide a holistic exploration of the ongoing trends in the 6G research. The investigations span novel waveform and channel coding techniques for improved energy efficiency, the “Gearbox PHY" concept for adaptive transceiver operations, and optimized radio transceiver designs that balance complexity and power consumption. The study also examines advanced multiple access schemes and cell-free massive massive multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) architectures to enhance spectral efficiency and uniform coverage. Integrated artificial intelligence solutionsat the PHY layer and insights to security and trustworthiness challenges in 6G networks are also provided. The findings offer insights into the fundamental trade-offs and provide several key PHY innovations that address sustainability, capacity, and resiliency challenges of future 6G wireless systems.