Guest editorial: 6G mobile networks: Emerging technologies and applications

Modern society has been widely benefiting from the advances in wireless technology. During the past decade, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to develop the fifth-generation (5G) wireless mobile networks. This resulted in enabling technologies for the three generic connectivity types in 5G (broadband, massive Internet-of-things connectivity and ultra-reliable low latency communication) as well as their coexistence. The final look of what will be called 5G is decided by the standardization process and it will not necessarily match the original ambitious vision of 5G. Due to this, as well as the extended time that will be required to deploy 5G ubiquitously, there are already initiatives to carry out research on 6G wireless networks. Those would have to respond to the exponential growth of mobile traffic due to AR/VR, holographic communications, V2X, autonomous driving, networked intelligence, and other, yet unknown use cases of Internet-of-Everything (IoE). These demanding use cases call for revolutionary design and novel enabling technologies on spectrum-, energy-, and cost-efficient communications for the sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks.