German Perspective on 6G - Use Cases, Technical Building Blocks and Requirements

The working group "WG:Roadmap" of the 6G Platform Germany, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), has set itself the goal of identifying emerging application scenarios, new technologies, and future requirements that shape the 6G research, development, and standardization efforts in Germany and Europe. Toward this goal, the WG has collected, analyzed, and harmonized numerous 6G use cases from various academic institutions and companies under the 6G Platform. As a result, this white paper conveys the current findings from the Working Group. It presents the most recent view on the identified 6G use cases and use case families, existing and novel technology building blocks needed to realize those use cases, as well as new requirements they entail. Representing the German 6G program, the use cases presented in this white paper give insights from German industrial companies, network operators, and further communications stakeholders whose needs may differ from countries with other economic priorities. Besides, the view shown in this paper follows the alignment with the prominent European 6G projects such as 6G-SNS and 6G-IA, which is in line with the working group’s goal to give a first glimpse of a German-European 6G vision. In addition to the goal of raising awareness in the ecosystem, the white paper is primarily aimed at companies involved in 6G standardization that want to contribute to the 6G standardization process or consider new business opportunities related to 6G. That is, they can explore the use cases, technology building blocks, and requirements obtained from a significant variety of network providers, industry, and academic partners in the 6G Platform that embraces 33 German 6G projects with a total funding of 700 million Euros. Subsequently, the findings in the white paper are also relevant to industry and academic alliances and associations. Not least, political representatives and ministries supporting research and industry can use the insights shown here and map them to their envisaged scenarios. Since this paper originates from a collection of specific and tangible use cases, which keep an application and, thus, the user in mind, the findings presented here can also serve as a basis for scientific communication purposes aiming to give an intuitive understanding of 6G.