6G Wireless Summit 2020 - organized as a virtual event - technical co-sponsorship by IEEE
A month ago the 6G Wireless Summit and associated workshops as hosted in Levi/Finland by the University of Oulu have made visible that the research leaders from industry, operators, verticals, and academia have started open exchange and collaboration to sharpen the key ingredients of 6G vision and 6G technology for step-change in value, sustainability and efficiency from 2030 onwards. Just to be clear, though: This is year 2 of an accelerated and successful 5G system commercial roll-out in key markets worldwide, 5G and 5G evolution will forcefully continue for the next 8 years or so to come; 6G effort at this time is rightfully centered on research, and we at Nokia Bell Labs are passionately engaged in such research effort… by the way, due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, the Levi conference organizers had successfully changed the format of the conference to a virtual format – one would have wished availability of 6G bandwidth and performance so as to have holo-deck sessions with everyone’s holographic avatar present in the meeting room!
What are the key technology enablers of the 6G era? We will connect the worlds in novel and innovatively open ways - physical world and digital world will be deeply intertwined in real-time, human biological systems seamlessly coupled and, at the same time, there will be a new human sensory and cognitive dimension across scenarios of 6G experience. Key technology enabling themes to be explored at Nokia Bell Labs and elsewhere will include the pervasive leverage of Machine Learning and AI across architectural domains namely, to flexibly define air interface as well as optimize service management and orchestration in 6G “network of networks” topology and open platform ecosystem. At the Levi summit, not surprisingly, THz research has been one of the prominent topics, in the sense of utilizing spectral bands of above 100GHz for both communications and sensing purposes, and for instance, exploring what the right waveforms and numerology for such endeavor would be…thereby enabling connectivity data speeds greater than 100 Gbps. We foresee millions of sub-networks (and devices becoming the network) in conjunction with extreme performance attributes in terms of both latency (as low as 0.1ms) and reliability (as high as nine 9s) and advanced ways to assure security, privacy, and trust.
Ultimately, 6G really will be about enabling step change from 2030 onwards in impact dimensions of growth, sustainability, and efficiency and, powerfully contributing to help deliver on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. 6G research in open and collaborative fashion will help build the foundation to deliver on sustainability and efficiency objectives such as increasing flexibility for dedicated “long-tail” platform and tailored service offering for growth in conjunction with extreme performance attributes as needed, dramatically reduced energy consumption, maximizing smart megacity impact in conjunction with greatly increased 6G device and sensor density. And, of course, 6G technology will help to protect civil and open society and assure swift disaster recovery from both advanced communications and sensing capability set...
6G will be key to help expand human possibilities and address some of our planet’s most promising opportunities and most pressing challenges at the same time. Now is the moment to ramp up our joint research agenda and keep utilizing vehicles of open exchange, pre-competitive, and pre-standards research cooperation to unleash the potential of 6G!
About the author of this article:
Volker Ziegler in his role of 6G leadership with Nokia Bell Labs & CTO, the industrial research and scientific development arm of Nokia, leads Nokia digital transformation initiatives aimed at exploring and leveraging innovations with customers and partners in the fledgling ecosystem for the 6G era.