With 5G Rollout Lagging, Research Looks Ahead to 6G

The new technologies and capabilities of 6G could fulfill and expand on 5G promises

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A person standing on a mountain dreaming of a 6G network.
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Amid a 5G rollout that has faced its fair share of challenges, it might seem somewhat premature to start looking ahead at 6G, the next generation of mobile communications. But 6G development is happening now, and it’s being pursued in earnest by both industry and academia.

Much of the future landscape for 6G was mapped out in an article published in March of this year in an article published by IEEE Communications titled “Toward 6G Networks: Use Cases and Technologies.”  The article presents the requirements, the enabling technologies and the use cases for adopting a systematic approach to overcoming the research challenges for 6G.

“6G research activities are envisioning radically new communication technologies, network architectures, and deployment models,” said Michele Zorzi,  a professor at the University of Padua in Italy, and one of the authors of the IEEE Communications article. “Although some of these solutions have already been examined in the context of 5G, they were intentionally left out of initial 5G standards developments and will not be part of early 5G commercial rollout mainly because markets are not mature enough to support them.”

The foundational difference between 5G and 6G networks, according to Zorzi, will be the increased role that intelligence will play in 6G networks. It will go beyond merely classification and prediction tasks as is the case in legacy and/or 5G systems.

While machine-learning-driven networks are now still in their infancy, they will likely represent a fundamental component of the 6G ecosystem, which will shift towards a fully-user-centric architecture where end terminals will be able to make autonomous network decisions without supervision from centralized controllers.

This decentralization of control will enable sub-millisecond latency as required by several 6G services (which is below the already challenging 1-millisecond requirement of emerging 5G systems). This is expected to yield more responsive network management.

To achieve this new kind of performance, the underlying technologies of 6G will be fundamentally different from 5G. For example, says Marco Giordani, a researcher at the University of Padua and co-author of the IEEE Communications article, even though 5G networks have been designed to operate at extremely high frequencies in the millimeter-wave bands, 6G will exploit even higher-spectrum technologies—terahertz and optical communications being two examples.

At the same time, Giordani explains that 6G will have a new cell-less network architecture that is a clear departure from current mobile network designs. The cell-less paradigm can promote seamless mobility support, targeting interruption-free communication during handovers, and can provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees that are in line with the most challenging mobility requirements envisioned for 6G, according to Giordani.

Giordani adds: “While 5G networks (and previous generations) have been designed to provide connectivity for an essentially bi-dimensional space, future 6G heterogeneous architectures will provide three-dimensional coverage by deploying non-terrestrial platforms (e.g., drones, HAPs, and satellites) to complement terrestrial infrastructures.”

Key Industry and Academic Initiatives in 6G Development:

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