An Abstracted Survey on 6G: Drivers, Requirements, Efforts, and Enablers

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of 6G, covering its drivers, requirements, potential use cases, key technologies, and research efforts, aiming to guide future development and standardization.

Contribution

It offers an abstracted, holistic overview of 6G, including growth predictions, use scenarios, performance targets, global research efforts, and technological challenges.

Findings

Mobile traffic and subscriptions projected to grow until 2030

Identified key performance indicators and target values for 6G

Summarized global research efforts and potential technological enablers

Abstract

As of today, 5G mobile systems have been already widely rolled out, it is the right time for academia and industry to explore the next generation mobile communication system beyond 5G. To this end, this paper provides an abstracted survey for the 6G mobile system. We shed light on the key driving factors for 6G through predicting the growth trend of mobile traffic and mobile service subscriptions until the year of 2030, envisioning the potential use cases and applications, as well as deriving the potential use scenarios. Then, a number of key performance indicators to support the 6G use cases are identified and their target values are estimated in a quantitatively manner, which is compared with those of 5G clearly in a visualized way. An investigation of the efforts spent on 6G research in different countries and institutions until now is summarized, and a potential roadmap in terms of the definition, specification, standardization, and spectrum regulation is given. Finally, an introduction to potential key 6G technologies is provided. The principle, technical advantages, challenges, and open research issues for each identified technology are discussed.