  6G is envisioned to offer higher data rate, improved reliability, ubiquitous
AI services, and support massive scale of connected devices. As a consequence,
6G will be much more complex than its predecessors. The growth of the system
scale and complexity as well as the coexistence with the legacy networks and
the diversified service requirements will inevitably incur huge maintenance
cost and efforts for future 6G networks. Network Root Cause Analysis (Net-RCA)
plays a critical role in identifying root causes of network faults. In this
article, we first give an introduction about the envisioned 6G networks. Next,
we discuss the challenges and potential solutions of 6G network operation and
management, and comprehensively survey existing RCA methods. Then we propose an
artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered Net-RCA framework for 6G. Performance
comparisons on both synthetic and real-world network data are carried out to
demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing method
considerably.
