| Internet-Draft | Challenges in Transporting Sensing Data | May 2025 |
| Yue, et al. | Expires 1 December 2025 | [Page] |
This document proposes leveraging Media Over QUIC (MOQ) to address the challenges of transmitting large-scale, real-time sensing data in 6G networks. By building on QUIC's low-latency and multiplexing capabilities, MOQ offers a flexible and efficient transport mechanism tailored to the dynamic and high-throughput requirements of 6G environments. The approach focuses on enabling protocol adaptability across diverse application scenarios such as autonomous driving, smart cities, and industrial IoT, while ensuring efficient data fragmentation, secure and anonymous transmission, and end-to-end QoS awareness. Through information-aware endpoints and optimized data delivery mechanisms, this solution supports scalable, reliable, and intelligent sensing data distribution in next-generation wireless networks.¶
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With the advent of 6G networks, there is an exponential increase in the volume and diversity of data generated by connected devices, sensors, and applications. This data, known as "sensing data," encompasses a wide range of information, including environmental, contextual, and behavioral data that can be leveraged for various advanced applications like autonomous driving, smart cities, and industrial IoT. However, transmitting this sensing data efficiently in a 6G environment poses a significant challenge due to its large volume, distributed and massive number of sources , dynamic nature, and stringent real-time requirements.¶
Media Over QUIC (MOQ) [I-D.ietf-moq-transport], a protocol designed to enable efficient media transport over QUIC, presents a promising solution for addressing these challenges. QUIC, being a modern transport protocol, provides low-latency, multiplexed connections with enhanced congestion control, making it well-suited for real-time communication in dynamic networks. MOQ builds on QUIC's capabilities to offer a robust and flexible framework for the high-throughput and low-latency transmission of multimedia data.¶
This document explores how MOQ can be leveraged to efficiently transmit sensing data in 6G networks, focusing on its potential to handle the unique requirements of real-time, high-volume data streams while ensuring reliability, scalability, and low overhead. The use of MOQ for data transport in this context can significantly improve the user experience and enable innovative services in next-generation wireless communication networks.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 RFC2119 [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here. Abbreviations and definitions used in this document: *MOQ: Media Over QUIC *V2V: Vehicle-to-Vehicle. *P2P: Point-to-Point¶
[I-D.lcurley-moq-use-cases] defines several use cases for MOQ, while this document focuses on MOQ use cases in the context of sensing data transmission.¶
Autonomous vehicles rely on real-time sensing data from onboard sensors (e.g., LiDAR, cameras) and external sources (e.g., traffic signals, nearby vehicles). MOQ facilitates the efficient and reliable transmission of this data in the following ways: 1. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) Communication: MOQ over QUIC establishes low-latency, multiplexed streams between vehicles, enabling the exchange of situational data like location, speed, and hazards in real-time. 2. Data Prioritization: High-priority sensing data, such as collision warnings, is tagged for immediate transmission, while less critical data, like traffic updates, is sent with lower priority to optimize bandwidth.¶
Smart cities generate diverse types of sensing data from devices such as traffic cameras, pollution monitors, and utility sensors. MOQ enhances urban management through: 1. Adaptive Data Aggregation: Sensors stream data to edge servers via MOQ's multiplexed connections, which dynamically adapt to varying link conditions to prevent packet loss during congestion. 2. Real-Time Event Streaming: For critical events (e.g., emergencies or system failures), MOQ ensures prioritized and low-latency delivery of sensor data to central control systems or cloud platforms for immediate response.¶
Factories equipped with IoT sensors require reliable, low-latency communication to monitor and optimize operations. MOQ supports industrial IoT through: 1. Real-Time Monitoring: MOQ streams sensor data such as vibration or temperature directly to monitoring systems, ensuring fast anomaly detection and response. 2. Redundant Transmission: For critical sensing data, MOQ can enable redundant streams over QUIC to ensure delivery even under adverse network conditions.¶
The application of Media Over QUIC (MOQ) for transmitting sensing data in 6G networks presents several key challenges that must be addressed to ensure its feasibility and effectiveness. These challenges are as follows:¶
Sensing data in 6G networks is generated in diverse scenarios, ranging from autonomous vehicles to smart cities and industrial IoT. Each scenario imposes unique requirements on the transport protocol, such as varying latency, throughput, and reliability demands. These use cases may involve real-time synchronous or asynchronous data transmission, as well as point to point (P2P) or multi-point communication modes. Ensuring that MOQ can adapt to these diverse requirements without compromising performance or introducing overhead remains a significant challenge , e.g., how to differentiate transmissions of sensing data flows with varying demands.¶
The sheer volume and velocity of sensing data in 6G networks necessitate highly efficient transport mechanisms. MOQ must address issues such as reducing overhead for small and frequent data packets, optimizing transmission for bursty data patterns, and ensuring low-latency delivery even under high traffic loads. Balancing efficient utilization of network resources while maintaining robust performance is critical. Avoid redundant data collection and transmission, e.g., to cache data on demand.¶
In applications such as smart cities and industrial IoT, sensing data often includes sensitive or identifiable information. Ensuring anonymity during transmission is essential to protect user privacy and comply with regulatory requirements. MOQ must integrate mechanisms to obscure identifying information in data streams while maintaining the integrity and usability of the transmitted data. Data sources and data consumers are not aware of each other.¶
Sensing data in 6G networks is often critical to the operation of real-time systems, making it a prime target for cyber threats such as interception, tampering, and unauthorized access. MOQ must incorporate advanced security measures to guarantee the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of data in transit. Additionally, the protocol must address the challenge of securely transmitting data in dynamic and heterogeneous network environments, including cross-domain communication. Data payload is visible only to data sources and data consumers, and is invisible to intermediate nodes. The payload needs to be encrypted.¶
Sensing data logs can be recorded, and data collection and consumption history is traceable.¶
MOQ endpoints should be aware of key contextual information related to sensing data to enable efficient and intelligent data distribution. This includes: 1. Network Awareness: The MOQ endpoint should have knowledge of network-related sensing data, such as cell or sensing area information, to optimize data distribution decisions. 2. QoS Awareness: MOQ should ensure QoS guarantees for the collection and transmission of sensing data, adjusting delivery mechanisms accordingly. Service Awareness: The MOQ endpoint should identify the intended service or application utilizing the sensing data. This enables proper classification, retrieval, and provisioning of sensing data to authorized services.¶