An Open Unified Addressing System for 6G Communication Networks

With the rapid and continuous development of the Internet, it is foreseeable that current addressing schemes and fixed-length IP addresses would create further bottlenecks and limitations in realizing future 6G networking requirements, such as massive connections, resource-constrained communication, and heterogeneous hyper interconnections and guaranteeing agreement-based services and KPIs. Moreover, the locator-based addressing semantic is unsuitable for mobile and content-oriented networks. Thus, this paper proposes the Open Unified Addressing (OUA) system, a novel, flexible, multi-semantic and hierarchical addressing architecture that better supports the flexibility and extensibility of the Internet protocol framework in the context of 6G Communications. The OUA addresses several limitations in the current IP protocol and improves communication efficiency. According to the evaluation with two typical forwarding models, the results show that the OUA system has almost no impact on forwarding delay. Moreover, it can provide scalable addressing spaces and shorten the route convergence time.