What Is 6G?

As 5G is deployed in the next several years, engineers and policymakers must start thinking about a 6G in the decade ahead. For example, the Center for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue is launching a task force on “Roadmap to 6G” in October, with participation from Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Intel INTC +1.1%, Nokia, Qualcomm QCOM -0.2% and other partners. We don’t know exactly how 6G will turn out, but we get to shape it today.

With the current speed of 5G phones not quite as advertised – and it will take some time to get even close – some may wonder why we need to already think about the next generation. 6G will be the generation connecting not just people but also things. And it is not just about higher speed, but also the delivery of:

·     A horizontal foundation: Rather than just another industry vertical like automobile or healthcare, wireless communications in the 6G era will serve as an essential foundation for almost all other industries in our society. Embedded in other systems, it will become the new “electricity.” Everything from a manufacturing floor and logistics supply chain to autonomous transportation and precision agriculture will come to depend on it.

·     A focus on latency: To use a superhero analogy, 6G will be not just like Hulk but more like Flash. Previous generations of wireless networks focused on throughput, as in how many bits can you send and receive each second. Higher throughput meant having a larger “pipe” to stream a Netflix NFLX +0.5% movie. 6G will be more about latency: How many seconds does it take to respond and to learn? A typical use case is edge analytics for industry 4.0, such as connected things interacting with augmented reality.

·     Heterogeneous networks: There are multiple types of wireless networks — cellular networks covering large outdoor space; WiFi for indoor or low-speed outdoor use, satellite networks such as low earth orbit constellation. 6G will be a collection of these heterogeneous, sometimes competing, networks. It will also have both public networks serving mobile phones and private networks serving just one enterprise in co-existence.

To achieve 6G’s potential, there must be advances in both wireless spectrum and network architecture. Let’s zoom in on the architectural innovations with three examples.

·     6G will be more edgy. In 2009, before the 4G LTE time, I founded the Princeton Edge Lab, focusing on how communication, computation and control shift closer to the end users.  It turns out that, as powerful as cloud has become, enabling the Internet of Things and distributing machine learning have made edge of networks the leading edge of innovation, delivering benefits that I would summarize as SCALE: Security, Cognition, Agility, Latency, and Efficiency. The trend of edge compute in 5G will accelerate and reach its full potential in 6G.

·     6G will be more open. Network architecture is about modularization: how to divide and conquer. And modularization is defined by the interfaces among the modules. Think of your home entertainment system: the display, the speakers, the wireless receivers, the remote control… and the ports that allow them to be connected. The Internet itself was based on modularization into “layers.” Open network architectures will allow swapping of modules in radio access and even across the layers of the whole network. American companies already have strength in many components, and companies that can integrate open networks back together will deliver flexible solutions to their customers.

·     6G might be more shared. The high-margin values of connectivity mostly reside with the applications riding on top of the network infrastructure. The infrastructure itself, as well as the underlying wireless spectrum in use, can be dynamically sliced and shared to reduce the cost of deployment and maintenance. At some point, the need for and new technologies in support of “sharing” will reach a critical point for widespread deployment. That might be this decade.

These innovations must go beyond research labs and start piloting in the field. We have been deploying intermediary steps toward 6G at Purdue University and in Indianapolis:

·     Urban millimeter wave deployment: In collaboration with the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and Nine Twelve Institute, we have launched the “Indy 5G Zone.” Not far from Indianapolis Motor Speedway hosting Indy 500, the Indy 5G Zone is an economic development zone for 5G app companies but it also installed a programmable test cell. Experiments carried out there have shown some unexpected impact of network protocols on the latency needed for edge analytics.  

·     Rural broadband coverage: Purdue Research Foundation and local partners have deployed broadband coverage to nearby farms using the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS): A far-reaching spectrum band that can be shared without paying a lot of money.

·     Private networks with open edge: Along with private sector partners, we are deploying edge networks using open architectures in Purdue’s “lab to life” residential community. In the spirit of horizontal foundation and heterogeneous networks, we are building out private networks in three cases: manufacturing floor, public safety, and smart transportation.

Chartering this roadmap to 6G will require close collaboration among industry, academia, public sector, and standardization organizations. And 6G will arrive before this decade is over, just not exclusively for your phones but all around us in more ways than we can imagine today.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mungchiang/2021/09/30/what-is-6g/?sh=6d7b5e2033db