Self-Evolving and Transformative Protocol Architecture for 6G

The fusion of digital and real worlds in all dimensions will be the driving force for future sixth-generation (6G) wireless systems. Ubiquitous in-time and on-time communication services between humans, machines, robots, and their virtual counterparts are essential, and they expand from the ground to air, space, underground, and deep sea. 6G systems are not only data pipelines but also large-scale distributed computing systems with integrated sensing, processing, storage, communication, and computing capabilities. It is challenging to build ubiquitous and intelligent 6G systems, handling stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, providing a rich set of communication modes, including unicast, multicast, broadcast, in-cast, group-cast, and supporting user-centric mobile applications. In this article, we propose a new protocol architecture: Self-Evolving and Transformative (SET) architecture, that can provide a wide range of control functions, and be intelligently configured for different types of 6G applications and networking environments. Its design principles, potentials, and open issues are discussed.