User-Centric Network Architecture Design for 6G Mobile Communication Systems

In conventional mobile communications systems, network services are designed to serve a huge amount of subscribers simultaneously, which is normally called a network-centric design approach. In comparison, this paper aims to investigate the user-centric design approach, which refers to systems that are designed to be user-defined, user-configurable and user-controllable. The user-centric approach allows for dedicated network services to be provided at the granularity of the user. A novel User-Centric Network (UCN) architecture is proposed in this work, which includes key design principles, corresponding network elements as well as procedures. It is envisioned that UCN is distributed in nature by leveraging enabling technologies like Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Distributed Hash Table (DHT). In this way, UCN not only provides extreme customization by offering fine-grained services, but also enables autonomous and trusted data control and privacy protection. A simulation platform is developed to verify the feasibility of the architecture, and to preliminarily evaluate its performance by numerical results in terms of hop count, bandwidth consumption, latency, success ratio and scalability.