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Special Issue on Deterministic, Reliable, Resilient and Programmable Networks for 6G
Submission Date: 2024-11-01

Creating a deterministic (understood as end-to-end time sensitive, reliable, resilient, and predictable) network, remains a challenge for cellular networks, especially in an industrial context. Wired deterministic communication standards have already emerged. In this scenario, Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), Deterministic Networking (DetNet), and 5G have specified mechanisms for interworking with those standards. However, the available support of 5G in conjunction with TSN and DetNet is not sufficient for future end-to-end time-critical applications.

Network programmability is key in supporting emerging 6G networks in achieving their promises of increased performance and flexibility at a lower cost. Deep network programmability is expected to characterize the new generation of mobile networks (6G), currently under development, towards supporting extreme performance requirements and service-specific operations.

Enriching next-generation (6G) mobile networks with data plane programming capabilities can bring significant benefits with regards to network slicing and multi-tenancy, dynamic traffic engineering, offloading network functions to the data plane, etc. Coupled with edge computing solutions and advanced machine learning algorithms for network automation can help to overcome network performance limits, e.g., in terms of latency and deterministic delivery.

This Special Issue (SI) aims to explore how future 6G networks can be more resilient, reliable, and time sensitive, while benefiting from additional flexibility through advance network programmability techniques, which can also be used to support deterministic networks.

The SI welcomes submissions from both academic and industry researchers, contributing to the progress of 6G networking research and development. Its scope includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

    Programmable data planes for TSN.
    Network softwarization for 6G.
    Programmable Networking Protocols.
    Programmable SDN and NFV: languages and architectures (P4 and others).
    Hardware acceleration for programmable network functions.
    Multi-tenant data planes.
    Orchestration and Management of Software-Defined Deterministic Networks.
    Control and Management of Data plane programmable devices.
    Artificial intelligence for deterministic networks.
    In network Machine Learning.
    In-network service level tuning and optimization; QoS.
    High precision traffic monitoring/telemetry.
    Service assurance and fulfillment programmability.
    Slicing for 6G.
    Intent-based systems and Digital twinning applied in 6G.
    Resiliency, reliability, time sensitiveness and predictability in 3GPP and WiFi systems.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the “Information for Authors” section of the Paper 

Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through the magazine’s IEEE Author Portal submission site. Select “January2025/DetNetfor6G” from the drop-down menu of Topic titles.
Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 1 November 2024
Initial Decision Notification: 15 January 2025
Revised Manuscript Due: 15 February 2025
Final Decision Notification: 28 February 2025
Final Manuscript Due: 31 March 2025
Publication Date: May 2025

Guest Editors

Chrysa Papagianni
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Dave Cavalcanti
Intel Labs, USA

Fabio Luciano Verdi
Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brasil

David Chieng
University of Nottingham Ningbo China, China

Carlos J. Bernardos
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain