Promoting deployment of innovative use cases in market verticals for the support of 6G evolution: the 6G-PATH context

6G is a revolutionary technology that will transform many technologies and enhance applications by offering high QoS and QoE, especially due to the inclusion of AI and ML features. 6G will be able to satisfy communication demands going far beyond the 5G/B5G evolution. To achieve this goal it is essential to identify future communication needs, performance requirements, system challenges and major technical options that will influence progress of research. In this context, the involvement of verticals becomes a factor of critical influence, especially via newly proposed scenarios and use cases. The 6G-PATH project will build an extensive B5G/6G infrastructure where a set of core architectures and domain-specific capabilities will be brought together and made available for integration of applications and use cases of relevance within four addressed verticals (agriculture, education, health and smart cities) to conduct large-scale pilots and trials. Results will be collected and analyzed to generate appropriate lessons and requirements for future 6G communications and to refine leading-edge business models for the intended 6G commercialization and exploitation. In the present work we discuss and analyze in detail the ten fundamental use cases of the 6G-PATH project, together with proposed broader sets of KPIs and KVIs, per case, that will allow for a better defined and comprehensive number of requirements for the intended evolution towards 6G.