Executive Summary

By 2030, our societies will become digitalized and data-driven, enabled through the key verticals like connected industries, intelligent transport systems and smart cities. Machine Type Communication (MTC) encompassing its massive and critical aspects, and near instant unlimited wireless connectivity are among the main enablers of such digitalization at large.

The recently introduced 5G New Radio is natively designed to support both aspects of MTC to promote the digital transformation of the society and particularly improve the overall efficiency of different vertical sectors. However, it is evident that some of the more demanding requirements of MTC cannot be fully supported by 5G networks. Alongside, further development of the society towards 2030 will give rise to new and more stringent requirements on wireless connectivity in general, and MTC in particular.

Driven by the societal trends towards 2030, the next generation (6G) will be an agile and efficient convergent network serving a set of diverse service classes and a wide range of key performance indicators (KPI).

This white paper explores the main drivers and requirements of an MTC-optimized 6G network, and presents a set of research directions for different aspects of MTC that can be synthesized through the following six key research questions:

• Will the main KPIs of 5G, namely reliability-latencyscalability, continue to be the dominant KPIs in 6G; or will emerging metrics such as energy-efficiency, end-to-end (E2E) performance measures and sensing become more important?
• How can different E2E service mandates with different KPI requirements be delivered through a multidisciplinary approach jointly considering optimization at the physical up to the application layer?
• What are the key enablers towards designing ultralow power receivers and highly efficient sleep modes to support ultra-low-cost ultra-low-power or even passive MTC devices?
• How can a disruptive rather than incremental joint design of a massively scalable waveform and medium access policy be tackled to efficiently support global connectivity for MTC?
• How can new service classes characterizing missioncritical and dependable MTC in 6G be supported through multifaceted connectivity and non-cellular centric wireless solutions?
• What are the potential enablers of long-term secure schemes considering the heterogeneous requirements and capabilities of MTC devices? How can lightweight and flexible usable ways of handling privacy and trust be designed in MTC by combining the user perspective with the technical perspective?