A Self-driven Virtual Elastic Infrastructure For Cell-free Based 6G Networks

The transformative impact of the future 6G communication networks on human society will highly depend on the capability to provide seamless and ubiquitous connectivity and services to the endusers. One of the main drivers in realizing this evolution is the implementation of reliable, responsive, and flexible networking solutions that are able to support services with the desired quality of experience anytime and anywhere. This article presents a novel solution for the management of 6G networks that are architected on an inno-vative cell-free-based, converged optical-wireless network configuration. The proposed approach is also based on the elastic edge computing notion and aims to provide an evolved edge computing system that allows application functions to be dis-aggregated and dynamically migrated across the edge and/or from the radio access network (RAN) to the core cloud and vice-versa, via a hierarchy of analytic and decision engines. In addition, by properly extending the Open-RAN architecture to support cell-free networking and by applying novel machine-learning techniques to intelligently recon-figure the network in near real-time, the proposed solution is able to achieve enhanced flexibility and increased application performance.