Toward an Integrated 6G Compute Architecture

Compute-intensive use cases for wireless communications will be important to developing 6G systems. Increasingly difficult computational tasks will involve devices that may be processoror power-limited. Thus, the ability to offload or distribute computation to diverse locations in the system will be essential to keep these tasks in the realm of feasibility. Current 5G systems have addressed this issue via the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) framework. This column describes a more general approach to distributed computing in 6G systems, encompassing the flexible and dynamic use of device and edge-of-network compute resources along with MEC nodes and centralized cloud servers, while treating communication and computation as complementary aspects of the underlying service that can be jointly evaluated and managed.