Medium Access for Push-Pull Data Transmission in 6G Wireless Systems

TL;DR

6G requires goal-oriented, data-driven MAC to support AI-enabled, real-time applications. The authors propose a push-pull taxonomy and a time-division frame that balances pull-reserved and push/shared slots under centralized or decentralized control, guided by data relevance and timing. They identify integration challenges, including intelligent MAC design, energy efficiency, and seamless O-RAN deployment with dynamic resource management. The work outlines practical design guidelines and demonstrates how push-pull coexistence can enhance anomaly reporting and learning tasks in a 6G environment.

Abstract

Medium access in 5G systems was tailored to accommodate diverse traffic classes through network resource slicing. 6G wireless systems are expected to be significantly reliant on Artificial Intelligence (AI), leading to data-driven and goal-oriented communication. This leads to augmentation of the design space for Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols, which is the focus of this article. We introduce a taxonomy based on push-based and pull-based communication, which is useful to categorize both the legacy and the AI-driven access schemes. We provide MAC protocol design guidelines for pull- and push-based communication in terms of goal-oriented criteria, such as timing and data relevance. We articulate a framework for co-existence between pull and push-based communications in 6G systems, combining their advantages. We highlight the design principles and main tradeoffs, as well as the architectural considerations for integrating these designs in Open-Radio Access Network (O-RAN) and 6G systems.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: A toy example of an scenario where a collects measurements from devices to construct a of the system. The coexistence of push- and pull-based communication enables the to coordinate requests for the most informative data to update the model while allowing devices to immediately report detected anomalies.
• Figure 2: Design space of push and pull communication paradigms depending on the data availability and timing of arrival.
• Figure 3: A time-diagram for the considered push-pull frame structures.
• Figure 4: achievable incoming traffic satisfying a target latency $L$ with reliability 99% as a function of $\alpha$cavallero2024co-existence.
• Figure 5: performance in terms of pull retrieval accuracy (solid lines) and push success probability (dashed lines) as a function of $\alpha$, and for different number $S$ of slots in a frame.