A Novel Approach to Radio Protocols Design for 6G

While discussing future use cases and deployment scenarios, it is very important to know where 6G is heading and the requirements 6G needs to fulfil. It is also crucial to consider early on the new requirements 6G will mean for implementers. This white paper reflects on how radio protocols have evolved since 2G, discusses the recent challenges 5G has faced, and offers a paradigm shift for the design framework of 6G radio protocols. The new framework proposes to rely on a dual stack approach, with a first stack hosting control plane functions and optimizations for low bitrate services, and a second stack optimized for parallel processing on radio processing units.