The next generation of cellular technology will deliver tremendous advances in bandwidth utilization, data transmission, and application support. 6G is expected to offer download speeds approaching 1TB per second, 1 microsecond latency, and unlimited bandwidth.

6G will enable people to interact with their surroundings in creative ways, including instant communication, connected robots, autonomous systems and wireless AI interactions.

Roger Nichols, Keysight's 6G program manager, answers questions about the technological advancements needed to realize the 6G vision.

Q: What will 6G do for us?

A: 6G will go a step further than 5G in combining communications with computing - so that Networking as a Service (NaaS) and Computing as a Service (caas) will become seamless.

This requires the use of advanced communications to distribute computing across cloud/centralized, edge, and clients in a flexible manner, optimized for use cases, business, and environmental considerations.

The expansion into new use cases in government, enterprise, healthcare, and education will all take advantage of the new capabilities of 6G to achieve goals not possible with previous generations of communications technology.

For example, better resource-focused blended education, increased engagement, flexibility, and reduced delays may be a result.

Enable more efficient movement of goods and services through automated supply chain management of communications and computing, and global positioning systems that leverage AI to help forecast demand, reduce waste, and respond to emergencies.

Mechanical automation has become more complex by combining advanced communications and location information with advanced sensing and distributed computing. Cobots will automate transportation and play an important role in manufacturing, construction, mining, and emergency management.

Immersive telepresence can combine 3D haptic holography and computing to provide real-time automated language translation for remote meetings, or integrate haptic holograms with digital twins and physical systems for remote training or troubleshooting.

Q: How to implement such a use case?

A: New use cases require developments in technology, business models, policies, and even social interactions.

The technologies involved will need to manage higher data rates, further reduce latency, provide predictable sub-millisecond times, expand the density of data devices/users it can handle, and seamlessly integrate wireline, microwave point-to-point, terrestrial cellular, satellite , Wi-Fi, PAN (Bluetooth), NFC and other network types.

Networks must become more reliable and resilient, as more prevalent use cases mean they will be used for higher-risk applications in terms of social, security, business risk, and environmental impact.

Distributed cloud, edge, client computing will require new software technologies, and improvements in artificial intelligence will be combined with computing to optimize system performance for use cases. System resource efficiency must be improved, with particular emphasis on energy and spectrum.

When applied to mobile wireless systems, cybersecurity will require significant improvements to cover a vastly expanded use case and threat surface, and increase the risk to the system.

Q: How will 6G support the growing Internet of Things (IoT)/Internet of Everything (IoE)?

A: As suggested, combining the flexibility and power of networking with distributed computing and sensing systems—some of which may even be embedded in the human body—means more seamless interconnection between various communication technologies .

Back in 2016, Mischa Dohler of Kings College London (now with Ericsson) said in a class on the Internet of Things, "We don't really have an Internet of Things, we have an 'Internet of Things', or rather, several indivual."

What it means is that the value of the Internet of Things (and ultimately the Internet of Everything) lies not only in interconnection, but also in using the resulting data in beneficial and secure ways.

Most IoT systems do not communicate with each other or share data to leverage knowledge, such as between parking management systems and traffic management systems. This type of interworking is either not complete or very difficult and time-consuming.

So one of the big advancements needed for 6G has little to do with radio links and more about how the information in the system is exploited.

By combining sensing, communications and distributed computing into a larger programmable network, the technology can be leveraged in a more comprehensive way.

Q: What is the specification roadmap for 6G?

A: Assuming 3GPP remains the de facto specification group for global standards, the first work on 3GPP specifications can be expected to begin around 2025. Some claim that the first achievable 6G features will appear in Release 21.

That said, there are two more things to keep in mind. First, 3GPP is not the only normative body that will contribute to 6G. Changes had to be made in the IETF, several parts of ETSI and O-RAN.

Standardizing things, however, requires a lot of work to develop and demonstrate the technological advancements needed to achieve this vision - not only is the list long, but each item has many layers of complexity that need to be built across all of them Innovation on a level.

This means that standardization cannot really begin unless there is more confidence in the ability to implement the required technology.