Envisioning a Future-Proof Global 6G from Business, Regulation, and Technology Perspectives

Future 6G has been envisioned to connect human, digital, and physical worlds as a novel general-purpose connectivity platform infrastructure that converges different enabling technologies for various purposes across domains. Competing 6G vision documents have been published to influence the global IMT toward 2030 and beyond (i.e., 6G) vision work at the ITU-R in terms of enabling technologies, usage scenarios, and capabilities, following the technology-dominated tradition stemming from prior mobile communication generations. The current visions comprise a complex mix of competing and partially overlapping elements, lacking a coherent and holistic framework and terminology to reconcile a global 6G vision that would help in its successful development and commercialization. Although the published visions increasingly address sustainability and human-centricity as key drivers, they lack an integrated multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach to integrating the drivers. To help the global 6G vision building process, this article offers a human-centric and sustainability-driven framework and actions for defining and developing 6G. The framework defines inter-related questions needed to define and develop 6G, such as why we are doing 6G, who we are doing it for, who are doing it, for what purposes users will use it, how users will use it, how we will make 6G work, and how we will measure it. The framework is used for presenting selected future examples of 6G usage scenarios. The presented framework builds on the analysis of the existing 6G vision works and forms a foundation for joint global future-proof 6G visioning.