In 2021, we are yet to see a strong expansion of 5G around the world with networks providing new possibilities of communication and services that are to be provided to transform the society. As we will witness this success, we must not forget the first steps which were taken towards the direction of 5G. About a decade ago when 4G was just beginning to roll out, it was still hard to determine what would be the needs after that period of time.

There are no questions that the continuing transformation will eventually rise to demanding situations beyond what 5G can meet. In 2030, for example, society will be fashioned by the means of 5G for 10 years and new services will have appeared. Inspite of the built-in flexibility of 5G, we’re starting to see the horizon wherein additional abilities are needed. This calls for a persevered evolution – following the pull from society’s needs and push from greater and advanced technological gear becoming available – that have to be addressed for a 6G era around 2030.

Four important drivers will emerge for the 2030 generation: 

(Source: Img)

 

Evolution of the Next Big G

Historically, when we’ve gone from one wireless generation to the following (3G to 4G and 4G to 5G), it meant noteworthy infrastructure investments and rebuilding custom-designed structures

(Source: www.snl.com)

According to Samsung white paper, the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) will begin to work to “define a 6G vision” in 2021. The usual will possibly be completed around 2028, and we can see the first 6G products around then. Enormous deployment will appear around 2030, Samsung says.

(Source: i.pcmag.com)

 

Envisioning Tomorrow’s Network

Getting ready for the subsequent massive telecom evolution years in advance is nothing new. Even though it’s still early for this effort, plenty of details remain to be worked out. 

To serve as the platform for a tremendous range of new and evolving services, the abilities of future wireless access networks need to be enhanced and extended in diverse dimensions compared to the networks of today. This consists of having classic capabilities (together with possible statistics costs, latency, and system potential) as well as new ones (with some being greater qualitative in nature).

Starting with the classic capabilities, the focus ought to remain on higher achievable data rates in all applicable scenarios. This includes the opportunity to offer several hundred gigabits per second and sub-millisecond latency give up to end in specific scenarios. Equally important is the possibility to provide high-speed connectivity with predictably low latency and low jitter rate.

These future wireless access networks ought to be capable of serving an exponentially growing traffic demand without increasing overall costs.

There is a need to continue the growth of wireless communication and target full global coverage — closing the digital divide to remote regions — whilst supporting a dramatically wide variety of gadgets with a view that it will be embedded all throughout the society. As a fundamental precept to permit for further digital inclusion, the total cost of ownership must be on a sustainable level.

Network energy perfomance played a crucial role in the development of 5G, and it will likely be even extra vital for future wireless access solutions. An acceleration in traffic need not mean accelerated energy usage.

As wireless networks increasingly turn out to be one of the most essential components of the society, resilience and security capabilities are important. The network must be able to offer service when part of the infrastructure is disabled because of natural disasters, local disturbances, or breakdowns in society, and it should offer robust resistance against deliberate malicious assaults.

In terms of trustworthiness, these networks should additionally be capable to leverage new confidential computing technologies, improve carrier availability, and offer enhanced security identities and protocols with end-to-end  assurance.

Finally, to power the overall digitalization and automation of society, networks need high-precision positioning and detailed sensing capabilities from their environment.

(Source: www.ericsson.com)

 

Technological Elements of 6G

(Source: www.ericsson.com)

Network Adaptability

By increasing the adaptability of networks, several key efficiencies may be addressed. These might be related to the cost of deployments, energy consumption, network development and expansion, and control and operations.

Mechanisms to ensure dynamic network deployments will be the key to support the cost-effective deployment of high capacity, resilient networks in the near future. This will make an operator more agile when handling new business opportunities and new emerging use cases.

Enhanced end-to-end Connectivity

Future applications need to leverage high-performance connectivity, fulfilling required bandwidth, dynamic behaviours, resilience, and further needs. Network capabilities must be available to give end-to-end and match the evolution of applications and internet technology. This affects, for example, application–network collaboration, resilience mechanisms, evolution of the end-to-end transport protocols, and methods to deal with latency.

Extreme Performance and Coverage

The future wireless access solution must provide truly extreme performance in a multitude of dimensions and in all applicable situations in order to permit future in-demand services at appropriate costs. This includes, for instance, extreme data rates and latency performance when so required, extreme system capacity to be able to deliver the services to a large number of users, and true global coverage of the wireless access.

Embedded Devices Everywhere

Future services would require connectivity everywhere and in everything. 6G networks can support trillions of embeddable devices and can provide trustworthy connections that are available all the time.

Today’s massive machine-type communication provides data rates up to a couple of kilobits per second. Despite the fact that their battery life is often up to 10 years in some cases, battery replacement or charging limits the applicability of these gadgets. Energy harvesting — which essentially means a device’s energy is obtained from ambient energy within the form of light, vibrations, temperature differences, or maybe even radio waves — opens up the opportunity for devices to not need battery replacement or charging. The amount of energy possible to reap is usually very small implying that extremely energy-efficient communication protocols need to be developed.

Highly miniaturized devices, leveraging advances in nanoelectronics, can allow micro networks with extreme low power and range. These micro networks would consume extremely low power and could route to a full network using ultra-low-power wireless connectivity (for instance, by using the 400MHz ISM band) through surface hubs.

Cognitive Networks

To understand future networks without accelerating degrees of cost and complexity, we need to remove the level of intelligence of these networks. Cognitive networks will assist in enhancing energy efficiency and ensure service availability. We expect this to occur in two methods: 

  1. in optimizations that are tough to attain with conventional algorithms, where AI Machine Learning (ML) can support, and 
  2. in evolving the operations systems to address most of today’s system management tasks autonomously, where AI Machine Reasoning (MR) can play an essential role.

Network Computer Fabric

6G will deliver all of the physical matters into the realm of computers. It will act not only as a connector but also as a controller of physical systems — starting from simple terminals, complex and performance-sensitive robotic control, and AR applications —in a network compute fabric for the highest efficiency.

Service providers can make use of their assets by integrating compute and storage into more virtualized networks to provide applications with maximum performance, reliability, low jitter, and millisecond latencies. The network-compute fabric will thus provide equipment and services past connectivity, such as accelerated compute and data services for customer segments and verticals, which includes organizations and industries.

Trustworthy Systems

The ability to withstand, detect, respond to, and recover from attacks and unintended disturbances is a cornerstone in designing trustworthy systems. The 4 essential building blocks for trustworthy systems are use of private computing solutions, secure identities and protocols, service availability, and security assurance and protection.

AI is anticipated to have a major impact on future technological evolution as well as security and is expected to assist in all the four areas mentioned above. At the same time, the trustworthiness of the AI components also becomes important.

 

Conclusion

There is a strong upcoming need for communication on the 2030 horizon, with the ameliorations that began with the aid of 5G, spurring increasing expectations in society, accelerated by advancements in enabling technology.

Development is ramping up in formulating capability goals for the 6G generation and investigating more than a few promising technological components that may become part of 2030 networks.

6G is assured to generate as many conspiracy theories as scientific theories. Eventually, it's going to settle down to a list of feasible technologies that tech firms will work to enforce around 10 years from now.

This is the right time to initiate advanced research on the 6G era aimed at expanding the abilities for the needs of 2030. The advancements in technology and system design can enable ever-present intelligent communication. This journey towards future networks should naturally build on the strengths of 5G, which continue to evolve in new releases, and ought to be taken in collaboration with the academic network and other enterprises aiming at a globally aligned way forward.