6G and Beyond: The Future of Wireless Communications Systems

By Ian F. Akyildiz, Ahan Kak, Shuai Nie. IEEE Access, 2020

1,079 citations recorded by the source corpus.

6G and beyond will fulfill the requirements of a fully connected world and provide ubiquitous wireless connectivity for all. Transformative solutions are expected to drive the surge for accommodating a rapidly growing number of intelligent devices and services. Major technological breakthroughs to achieve connectivity goals within 6G include: (i) a network operating at the THz band with much wider spectrum resources, (ii) intelligent communication environments that enable a wireless propagation environment with active signal transmission and reception, (iii) pervasive artificial intelligence, (iv) large-scale network automation, (v) an all-spectrum reconfigurable front-end for dynamic spectrum access, (vi) ambient backscatter communications for energy savings, (vii) the Internet of Space Things enabled by CubeSats and UAVs, and (viii) cell-free massive MIMO communication networks. In this roadmap paper, use cases for these enabling techniques as well as recent advancements on related topics are highlighted, and open problems with possible solutions are discussed, followed by a development timeline outlining the worldwide efforts in the realization of 6G. Going beyond 6G, promising early-stage technologies such as the Internet of NanoThings, the Internet of BioNanoThings, and quantum communications, which are expected to have a far-reaching impact on wireless communications, have also been discussed at length in this paper.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/402e6245d6d2b8aba881d00d652c6121cf52fe27

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Citations in the corpus

Terahertz Band Communication: An Old Problem Revisited and Research Directions for the Next Decade (2021, background): “RISs are a key technology to enable intelligent propagation environments in 6G systems [3], [92].”
Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey (2021, background): “The concept is not that different from distributed MIMO or coordinated multipoint [353], except for the fact that there are no cell boundaries considered when allocating users to access points.”
The Road Towards 6G: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “is mainly troubled by the broadness of 6G new spectrum that leads to a difficulty in designing transceivers capable of dynamic all-spectrum sensing [93].”
Federated Learning for Internet of Things: Recent Advances, Taxonomy, and Open Challenges (2020, background): “Machine learning will be considered to be an integral part of 6G [1], [6], [180], [181].”
A Survey on Nongeostationary Satellite Systems: The Communication Perspective (2021, background): “An interference suppression scheme is proposed in [215] based on a code-aided technique in the global navigation satellite system ISLs.”
Single and Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for AI-Enabled Wireless Networks: A Tutorial (2020, background): “Meanwhile, several research initiatives [1], [2], [3] proposed road-maps or visions for 6G networks to overcome the limitations of 5G technologies.”
Terahertz Wireless Channels: A Holistic Survey on Measurement, Modeling, and Analysis (2021, background): “as a key technology to fulfill future demands for 6G and beyond [19], [23], [24], the advancement of practical and commercial products is still ongoing.”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “Research directions towards realizing 6G are elaborated in [12], [22], [25].”
6G for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communications: Enabling Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities (2020, background): “Quantum computing is considered as one of the revolutionary technologies for generic 6G wireless communications in a number of seminal works (e.g., [14], [16], [54], [57], [58]).”
6G Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “It is estimated that IoT will achieve an impressive development in the next few years.”