Resilience: “… ability to recover, adapt, and evolve in the face of challenges.” 

6G must be designed to withstand, adapt to, and evolve amid prolonged, complex disruptions. Mobile networks’ shift from efficiency-first to sustainability-aware has motivated this white paper to assert that resilience is a primary design goal, alongside sustainability and efficiency, encompassing technology, architecture, and economics.

We promote resilience by analysing dependencies between mobile networks and other critical systems, illustrating how cascading failures spread through infrastructures. We formalise resilience in the context of mobile networks, distinguishing it from commonly associated concepts of reliability and robustness. Subsequently, we translate this into measurable capabilities: graceful degradation, situational awareness, rapid reconfiguration, and learning-driven improvement and recovery.

Architecturally, we promote edge-native and locality-aware designs, open interfaces, and programmability to enable islanded operations, fallback modes, and multi-layer diversity (radio, compute, energy, timing). Key enablers include AI-native control loops with verifiable behaviour, zero-trust security rooted in hardware and supply-chain integrity, and networking techniques that prioritise critical traffic, time-sensitive flows, and inter-domain coordination.

Executive summary Resilience also has a techno-economic aspect: open platforms and high-quality complementors generate externalities that enhance resilience while opening new markets. We identify nine business-model groups and several patterns aligned with our resilience definition, and we outline governance and standardisation needs.

This white paper serves as an initial step and catalyst for 6G Resilience. It aims to inspire researchers, professionals, government officials, and the public, providing them with the essential components to understand and shape the development of 6G Resilience. 

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