Editorial: Towards 6G Technologies, Networks, Hardware, and Architectures

5G is going to be launched, becoming a commercial reality with far-reaching benefits. Building on the successful steps of 5G, 6G is envisaged go beyond the three major pillars of 5G, i.e., enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communication (mMTC), to reach the revolution of ubiquitous intelligence of everything. In the 6G era, the physical, cyber, and biological worlds are intelligently connected throughout the so-called societal digitalization which enables an entire transformation from connected people and things to connected sense and intelligence. In this context, achieving the ultimate user experience in all applications and services requirements, 6G needs to provide a disruptive set of KPIs and goals such as peak rate (1Tbps), experienced data rate (10-100Gbps), capacity (1000X w.r.t. 5G), location precision (50 cm outdoor and 1 cm indoor), user plane latency (0.1 ms), reliability (nine 9’s), connection density (10millions/km²), energy and cost efficiency (100X w.r.t 5G), coverage (10 dB gain w.r.t. 5G), battery life (20 years for sensors), etc. …