Native Support of AI Applications in 6G Mobile Networks Via an Intelligent User Plane

While the concept of AI4Net has been widely discussed in the past decade and adopted in 5G, its counterpart, Net4AI, has not gained that much attention so far. This is mostly due to the absence of solutions for the network to support AI applications beyond providing the communication infrastructure. In-Network Computing (INC) is a promising paradigm, potentially being integrated into 6G, which opens new solutions for realizing Net4AI. This paper focuses on the specific case of INC-assisted Split-AI. A Neural Network (NN) is split vertically and the executions of some layers of the split NN are offloaded to the entities of an Intelligent 6G User Plane. With the example of INC-assisted Split-AI, we elaborate on the challenges of Net4AI and discuss key requirements for the 6G architecture in terms of novel capabilities and information exchange.