As the digital world becomes increasingly intelligent, automated, and ubiquitous, the flow of data becomes ever more vital. Mobile wireless networks are the data highways, and in a fully connected, intelligent digital world, they will need to connect everything from people, vehicles, sensors, data, cloud resources, and even robotic agents. Fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks that are being released soon offer significant advances but may be unable to meet the full connectivity demands of emerging systems.5G technologies have always been associated with trade-offs that involve latency, power consumption, deployment costs, hardware complexity, experienced throughput, end-to-end reliability, and communication resilience. Of course, AI is predicted to play a big part in any new standard and one way may be that it allows us to specify even less of what is happening, and just let individual intelligent machines fill in the gaps in our standard.
The idea of auto-tuning the modem in the field is a new one that may well play an important role in 6G. It would be expected that AI would be fully integrated into an intelligent network system in time for 6G that is called “distributed intelligent wireless computing” so that the 6G the network may also be defined with an expectation of deep learning. On the contrary, the market demands of 2030 and beyond will introduce new applications, with more stringent requirements (in terms of ultra-high reliability, capacity, energy efficiency, and low latency) which may saturate the capacity of traditional technologies for wireless systems. 6G will contribute to filling this gap. This special issue envisions and emphasizes on this point that how 6G systems can be developed to address the needs of smart networks of the future. Several potential 6G use cases and attempts to provide estimates on requirements to guide design. The demands are daunting, but several promising technologies that can provide the basis for 6G systems are also surveyed. On the Other hand, many of the cellular devices connected nowadays are machines (IoT) rather than people, with the rise of Smart Homes, Smart Building and Smart Cities, so 5G and 6G will include increased demands for machine-to-machine communications, including robotic and autonomous drone delivery and transport systems.
The Internet-of-Everything (IoE) is a related development. Other trends predicted for 6G include Ultra-dense cell networks, Reconfigurable Hardware, Millimeter Waves for user access, enhanced Optical-Wireless interface, Networked VLC, Intelligent Networking, and technologies to enable a Full Immersive Experience for users. One thing we can be confident on is that users will demand and expect greater global coverage, higher capacities, and always-on connectivity for new and future internet services and applications, and that 6G will be expected to deliver all of these. One factor in the drive towards 6G is the growing trend of Software Defined Radio (SDR) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN): These mean that future 6G technologies will be easier to upgrade to, with cloud-based resources and software loads enabling the upgrade of existing 4G and future 5G equipment to enable 6G applications. This reduces the expensive and disruptive “forklift” upgrades of previous mobile standards, which generally entail the replacement of physical infrastructure.
Inter-vendor operability is also an increasing trend, with democratization, fueled through the open-source development of technologies. This special issue has focused on A Vision of 6G Wireless Systems: Applications, Trends, Technologies, and Open Research Problems and is not limited to these topics mentioned above and it can be found more research areas in this domain of technology for all researchers and scientists who work and do research extensively in these professional fields. All authors and scientists are welcomed and acknowledged to send their working papers, ideas and their solutions and newly designed platforms to be reviewed and probably published in this special issue of IEEE sensors journal with the high-quality format of presentation, structure, and expressing goals based on clarity of subject and explanation of its details.
Keywords:
- Multiple-Sensor Systems
- Smart Sensor Systems
- Sensor Arrays
- Combined Sensors (Such as Electrical & Mechanical, etc.)
- Packaging and Interconnection
- Sensor Buses and Communications
- Networked Sensor Fusion and Decisions
- Sensor Telemetry and Monitoring
- Acoustic Velocity Sensors, Proximity Sensors
- Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks
- Ad-hoc And Opportunistic Networks
- Vehicular Networks
- Internet of Everything (IoE)
- IoT (Internet of Things)
