Optimizing Radio Access for Massive IoT in 6G Through Highly Dynamic Cooperative Software-Defined Sharing of Network Resources

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been a major part of many use cases for 5G networks. From several of these use cases, it follows that 5G should be able to support at least one million devices per km2. In this paper, we explain that the 5G radio access schemes as used today cannot support such densities. This issue will have to be solved by 6G. However, this requires a fundamentally different approach to accessing the wireless medium compared to current generation networks: they are not designed to support many thousands of devices in each other’s vicinity, attempting to send/receive data simultaneously. In this paper, we present a 6G system architecture for trading wireless network resources in massive IoT scenarios, inspired by the concept of the sharing economy, and using the novel concept of spectrum programming. We simulated a truly massive IoT network and evaluated the scalability of the system when managed using our proposed 6G platform, compared to standard 5G deployments. The experiments showed how the proposed scheme can improve network resource allocation by up to 80%. This is accompanied by similarly significant improvements in interference and device energy consumption. Finally, we performed evaluations that demonstrate that the proposed platform can benefit all the stakeholders that decide to join the scheme.