Communications in the 6G Era

By Harish Viswanathan, Preben Elgaard Mogensen. IEEE Access, 2020

605 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The focus of wireless research is increasingly shifting toward 6G as 5G deployments get underway. At this juncture, it is essential to establish a vision of future communications to provide guidance for that research. In this paper, we attempt to paint a broad picture of communication needs and technologies in the timeframe of 6G. The future of connectivity is in the creation of digital twin worlds that are a true representation of the physical and biological worlds at every spatial and time instant, unifying our experience across these physical, biological and digital worlds. New themes are likely to emerge that will shape 6G system requirements and technologies, such as: (i) new man-machine interfaces created by a collection of multiple local devices acting in unison; (ii) ubiquitous universal computing distributed among multiple local devices and the cloud; (iii) multi-sensory data fusion to create multi-verse maps and new mixed-reality experiences; and (iv) precision sensing and actuation to control the physical world. With rapid advances in artificial intelligence, it has the potential to become the foundation for the 6G air interface and network, making data, compute and energy the new resources to be exploited for achieving superior performance. In addition, in this paper we discuss the other major technology transformations that are likely to define 6G: (i) cognitive spectrum sharing methods and new spectrum bands; (ii) the integration of localization and sensing capabilities into the system definition, (iii) the achievement of extreme performance requirements on latency and reliability; (iv) new network architecture paradigms involving sub-networks and RAN-Core convergence; and (v) new security and privacy schemes.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/695c8afd1d2b222c9f1ba0ccd1ac895df2a80af9

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Citations in the corpus

The Roadmap to 6G Security and Privacy (2021, background): “…and virtualized to be implemented closer to RAN, which benefits low-latency services, while higher-layer RAN functions are being centralized, RAN and core functions can be combined (RAN-Core convergence) in order to simplify the network and facilitate the implementation of some services [6].”
A Survey on Beyond 5G Network With the Advent of 6G: Architecture and Emerging Technologies (2020, methodology): “6G will incorporate AI and ML-based interfaces, extended-spectrum, specialized slicing based architecture, extreme networking and enhanced secured schemes for carrying out data transmission [59], [60].”
Reducing Offloading Latency for Digital Twin Edge Networks in 6G (2020, neutral): “SinceDTsgenerallyhelpsimplifythe solutionofpracticalproblemsormeettheactualintelligent requirements,DThasbeenwidelyexpectedasakeyenablers in6Ginthecomplexinternetofeverything(IoE)[26].”
Cellular, Wide-Area, and Non-Terrestrial IoT: A Survey on 5G Advances and the Road Toward 6G (2021, methodology): “IoT devices in this category go beyond just data collection and represent high-bandwidth and lowlatency applications, technically known as ultra-reliable lowlatency communications (URLLC).”
Convergent Communication, Sensing and Localization in 6G Systems: An Overview of Technologies, Opportunities and Challenges (2021, background): “Although a few contributions, such as [19], [20] mention the potential of integrating localization and sensing into the system design or address speciﬁc technologies [22], [23] (e.g., IRS and AI/ML, respectively), to the best of our knowledge, our contribution is the ﬁrst one to focus on the 6G…”
A Tutorial on Fluid Antenna System for 6G Networks: Encompassing Communication Theory, Optimization Methods and Hardware Designs (2024, background): “HRLLC builds upon the ultra reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) of IMT-2020, catering to specialized use cases with stringent requirements on reliability and latency [7], [8].”
Joint Design of Communication and Sensing for Beyond 5G and 6G Systems (2021, background): “At this juncture, academic and industry research is shifting focus towards 6G. Numerous papers outlining the vision and technologies for 6G have been published [3]–[12].”
Sionna: An Open-Source Library for Next-Generation Physical Layer Research (2022, background): “One recurring vision in many papers is that of creating digital twin worlds to connect physical and biological entities and to enable new mixed-reality experiences such as the Metaverse [3].”
Digital Twins: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Challenges, Trends and Future Prospects (2022, background): “Connectivity in the future is highly dependent on development of DT environments [151] that are actual representation of their physical counter parts.”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “Societal and technological trends that trigger the drive towards 6G are discussed in [12], [24], [26], [29].”
The Road Towards 6G: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “Mogensen attempted to paint a broad picture of communication needs and technologies in the era of 6G [23], where new themes that are likely to shape 6G require-”
6G Wireless Communication Systems: Applications, Requirements, Technologies, Challenges, and Research Directions (2019, background): “New items that may require sixth-generation (6G) system include (i) massive man-machine interfaces, (ii) ubiquitous computing among local devices and the cloud, (iii) multisensory data fusion to create multi-verse maps and different mixed-reality experiences, and (iv) precision in sensing and actuat”