Envisioning Device-to-Device Communications in 6G

To fulfill the requirements of various emerging applications, the future sixth generation (6G) mobile network is expected to be an innately intelligent, highly dynamic, ultradense heterogeneous network that interconnects all things with extremely low-latency and high speed data transmission. It is believed that artificial intelligence (AI) will be the most innovative technique that can achieve intelligent automated network operations, management and maintenance in future complex 6G networks. Driven by AI techniques, device-to-device (D2D) communication will be one of the pieces of the 6G jigsaw puzzle. To construct an efficient implementation of intelligent D2D in future 6G, we outline a number of potential D2D solutions associating with 6G in terms of mobile edge computing, network slicing, and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) cognitive networking.