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Abstract: With the acceleration of a new round of global scientific, technological, and industrial revolution, the next generation of information and communication technology, i.e., 6G, will inject new momentum into industry transformation and upgrad-ing, as well as into economic innovation and development. This will subsequently promote a global industrial integration. Wireless communication will be ubiquitous in all areas of future society, supporting novel applications with various performance requirements, such as immersive- or interactive-experience applications requiring a large bandwidth, autonomous driving and vehicle-to-everything applications requiring ultra-high reliability and ultra-low latency, and applications for industrial Internet requiring massive machine-type connectivity. Facing the challenges of the post-Moore and post-pandemic era, wireless communication needs breakthroughs in network architecture to improve the intelligence, security, robustness, bandwidth, and heterogeneity. With this background, several important tendencies have emerged in the development of 6G wireless communications:
1. Future wireless networks will evolve from “human-to-human” communications into intelligent “human-to-machine” communications. In addition to enabling communications among humans, future wireless networks will be able to support close connections among humans and machines. The behavior and intent of humans will be sensed and communicated to machines that will accordingly adjust their operations. Typical scenarios include smart building, intelligent transportation, mixed reality (MR), and others.
2. Network nodes will evolve from carrying out only traditional communications to carrying out communication, sensing, computation, management, and caching in an integrated manner. To meet the diverse service requirements of mobile MR, intelligent transportation, industrial Internet of Things, and other areas, future networks will possess multiple functionalities. For example, by sensing human head position, pre-caching necessary content, and rendering high-quality images, network nodes can provide fully immersive MR experiences. In addition, with artificial intelligence (AI), network nodes can manage multi-dimensional resources in an on-demand fashion, where intent-driven network management and control can be realized.
3. Network architecture will focus on collaborations between the cloud and the network edge, which will become more heterogenous.
To shorten latency and alleviate the backhaul/fronthaul burden, the network edge must collaborate with the cloud. The first method of collaboration is that the cloud finishes AI model training and then deploys AI models into the network edge, which supports the so-called edge intelligence. In the second method, users demanding high throughput are served via a cloud radio access mode, while users requiring ultra-low latency can benefit from edge computation and caching. As for architecture heterogeneity, future networks are envisioned to incorporate unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, satellite communica-tion networks, and dense cellular networks, bringing three-dimensional and hierarchical network coverage.
In short, the evolution of existing 5G technolo-gies and the development of 6G need to address more stringent and diverse application scenarios, a more strict energy constraint, and the orchestration of multi-dimensional resources. These challenges call for an intellicise wireless network operation paradigm, where “intellicise” is a new adjective that we coin, standing for intelligence-endogenous and primitive-concise. Built upon the integration of AI and next-generation networking technologies, an intellicise wireless network continually explores and exploits new intelligent primitives, e.g., semantic base (Seb) in semantic communications, proactively takes sys-tematic entropy reduction as the global optimization objective, adaptively reshapes the core models of information systems, and ultimately endows itself with endogenous intelligence and primitive conciseness.
In this context, the journal Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering has organized a special feature on the theory and techniques for intellicise wireless networks. This special feature covers information theory, architecture design, and intellicise wireless networks for achieving air-space-ground-sea integration, resource management, hardware testbeds and platforms, as well as related applications. In addition, this feature is intended to provide a review of advancements and future research directions in the research field of intellicise wireless networks. After a rigorous review process, six papers have been selected for this feature, including one review article and five research articles.

智简无线网络理论与技术