Guest Editorial The Nexus Between Edge Computing and AI for 6G Networks

Zhi Zhou, Dusit Niyato, Zehui Xiong, Xiaowen Gong, Walid Saad, Xiaoming Fu

Abstract: The papers in this special issue focus on the novel area of the interplay between edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI) for 6G mobile communicaton networks. While 5G mobile communication has gradually opened the curtain of internet of everything and brings vertical transform to change the society, 6G is believed to open a new era of “Internet of Intelligence” with connected people, connected things, and connected intelligence, solving human challenges in many aspects and helping perfect the world we all live in. To empower 6G networks with AI capabilities, large volumes of multi-modal data of physical surroundings will be continuously generated by the mobile and IoT devices which reside at the network edge. Driving by this trend, there is an urgent need to push the AI frontiers to the network edge so as to fully unleash the potential 6G networks. To meet this demand, edge computing, an emerging paradigm that pushes computing tasks and services from the network core to the network edge, has been widely recognized as an indispensable part for the upcoming 6G networks.