National 6G Roadmap

— Creating the 6G vision and mapping steps to achieve it. Setting the stage to put North America at the forefront of wireless technology leadership for the next decade and beyond.

Framework for a North American 6G Vision

The NGA is a broad initiative that addresses the full wireless technology lifecycle from research to commercialization, and engages with diverse ecosystem consisting of operators, vendors, hyperscalers, research groups, academia, and government. NGA stakeholders span corporate and government leadership and policy makers to application developers in vertical markets, research scientists and engineers, and others.

The 6G Vision Framework addresses these diverse stakeholder needs at three levels:

National Imperatives: Encompasses the societal, economic, and governmental factors that drive each objective toward achieving future North American wireless leadership. To set a bold and clear vision, the change that will be realized with 6G compared to 5G is outlined, including the unique North American needs and leadership opportunities.
Applications and Markets: Includes key markets and use cases enabled by realizing the vision as well as co-dependencies with adjacent industries and groups.
Technology Development: Identifies new technology areas that are needed to achieve success of each objective and explains why these objectives cannot be achieved with 5G technologies alone. Key performance indicators are also identified to establish success criteria for technology objectives.

National 6G Roadmap: Setting Audacious Goals

Defining what it takes to deliver next generation wireless leadership is an audacious undertaking. The Roadmap to 6G sets audacious goals to help get there. Its six goals guide future global standards, as well as deployment, product, operation, and services recommendations for the networks of the future. They are:

Trust, security, and resilience must be advanced such that future networks are fully trusted by people, businesses, and governments. Networks must be resilient, secure, privacy-preserving, safe, reliable, and available under all circumstances. Governments will also adopt and use Next G technologies for military and defense purposes to protect their nations as future networks pervade many elements of critical infrastructure, including national security.
Cost efficiency in all aspects of the network architecture. Devices, wireless access, cell-site backhaul, overall distribution and energy consumption must be improved for delivering services in a variety of environment including urban, rural, and suburban, while also supporting increased data rates and services that are expected for future networks.
An enhanced digital world consisting of multi-sensory experiences to enable transformative forms of human collaboration as well as human-machine and machine-machine interactions. The goal is to bring life-improving use cases and support new economic value creation.
An AI-native future network is needed to increase the robustness, performance, and efficiencies of the radio network against more diverse traffic types, ultra-dense deployment topologies, and more challenging spectrum situations.
Distributed cloud and communications systems built on cloud and virtualization technologies, will lead to increased flexibility, performance, and resiliency for key use cases such as mixed reality, URLLC applications, interactive gaming, and multi-sensory applications.
Energy efficiency and the environment must be at the forefront of decisions throughout the life cycle, toward a goal of achieving IMT carbon neutrality by 2040. Advances will fundamentally change how electricity is used to support advanced communications and computer networks, while strengthening the relationship of information technology to the protection of our environment.