6G Data Plane: A Novel Architecture Enabling Data Collaboration with Arbitrary Topology

Although the fifth-generation wireless communication network (5G) has made much progress in improving the quality of user experience by providing large bandwidth transmission, it only provides the connectivity services between user equipments (UEs) and the network. With the sensing and intelligence are envisioned to become the native capability of the sixth-generation communication network (6G), there is an urgent need for a new network architecture enabling the “on-path-data-processing”, to make better leverage of distributed and ubiquitous computation resources and data. Thus, we propose a Data Plane in 6G network, which is independent of existing User Plane, aiming at constructing data pipelines based on various data service requirements. It systematically provides the collaboration of data among multiple network components with arbitrary topology with the support for on-path-data-processing. Based on this, we propose three data forwarding control protocols, guaranteeing the operation of Data Plane by providing data forwarding in any topology. Simulation experiments demonstrate the good scalability and efficiency of the three protocols in Data Plane.