Laying the Milestones for 6G Networks [From the Guest Editors]

The articles in this special section focus on the evolution of automotive engineering that deploy 6G networks. The continuous evolution of network technology and the digitization of the economy are key drivers for defining the expected 6G networks. Academia and industry have made tremendous strides during the past few years to shift the networking paradigm from human-centric communication to machine-type communication, and those gains will eventually lead to everything-type communication. Such developments have already enabled 5G systems to support massive connectivity, multigigabit data rates, massive multipleinput/ multiple-output (MIMO), millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communication, nonorthogonal multiple access, multiuser access, edge computing, dense wavelength division multiplexing for transport networks, service-based architectures, network slicing, network function virtualization, network automation, and core network encryption. Moreover, service requests are now processed using various sets of performance metrics in intelligent and self-healing fashions. Scaling these types of automated networks requires paradigm changes in communication network management, where communication and computation must ultimately fuse. Overall, this will lead to orders of magnitude of improved user satisfaction, and it eventually will spin out new, smaller domains for local and efficient service provisioning (e.g., private networks).