Towards A More Flexible Networking Landscape

Technological advancements leading to 5th generation networks mainly focused on improving coverage and performance in terms of bandwidth and latency. While these will likely remain aspects of continuous improvement, along with issues on reliability and security, this paper argues that flexibility is a key property that 6G networks should exhibit in order to overcome important limitations of the current networking landscape and fulfill emerging user needs and application requirements. We identify key areas that can contribute towards more flexibility, present existing efforts on relevant technologies and discuss the research challenges that need to be addressed in order to reach the desired level of flexibility.