The latest developments and recent progress on the key technologies enabling next-generation 6G mobile networks. “Toward 6G: A New Era of Convergence” offers an up-to-date guide to the emerging 6G vision by describing new human-centric services made possible by combinations of mobile robots, avatars, and smartphones, which will be increasingly replaced with wearable displays and haptic interfaces that provide immersive extended reality (XR) experiences. The authors-noted experts on the topic-include a review of their work and information on the recent progress on the Tactile Internet and multi-sensory haptic communications. The book highlights decentralized edge computing in particular via Ethereum blockchain technologies, most notably the so-called decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for crowdsourcing of human skills to solve problems that machines (such as autonomous artificial intelligence agents and robots) alone cannot solve well. The book also contains a review of the most recent and ongoing work on XR (including virtual/augmented/mixed reality). Specifically, the book describes the implications of the transition from the current gadgets-based Internet to a future Internet that is evolving from bearables (such as smartphones), moves towards wearables (for example Amazon's recently launched voice-controlled Echo Loop ring, glasses, and earbuds), and then finally progresses to nearables with embedded computing technologies and intelligent provisioning mechanisms for the delivery of human-intended services, including sixth-sense perceptions, in a 6G post-smartphone era. This important text: • Offers a review of the 6G network architectures and key enabling technologies • Explains why 6G should not be a mere exploration of more spectrum at high-frequency bands, but rather a convergence of upcoming technological trends • Describes the Tactile Internet's human-in-the-loop centric design principles and haptic communications models • Includes analytical frameworks to estimate the fluid orchestration of human + machine co-activities across unified communication network infrastructures • Explores the performance gains of cooperative computation offloading with communications and computation limitations in both fronthaul and backhaul Written for students, network researchers, professionals, engineers, and practitioners, “Toward 6G: A New Era of Convergence” explores the most recent advances on the key technologies enabling next-generation 6G mobile networks, with an emphasis on their seamless convergence.
