In March this year, the first global 6G summit was held in Finland. The organizer, olu University of Finland, invited 70 top communication experts from various countries to hold a closed door meeting. The main content is to make concerted efforts to formulate the world's first 6G white paper and clarify the basic direction of 6G development.
Recently, the white paper entitled "key drivers and research challenges of 6G wireless intelligence everywhere" finally came out, preliminarily answering questions such as how 6G can change public life, what technical features it has, and what technical difficulties it needs to solve.
6G leads to life change
The report predicts that by 2030, with the advent of 6G technology, many currently fantasy scenes will become a reality, and human life will have great changes.
With the development of new display, sensing and imaging devices and low-power special processors, smart phones will be replaced by a lightweight glasses. They can achieve ultra-high resolution and frame rate through ultra-high network speed, and can provide 'XR' services integrating virtual reality, augmented reality and hybrid reality, which are seamlessly connected with our senses and motion.
High resolution sensing imaging, wearable display and ultra-high speed wireless network will make remote holography for real-time capture, transmission and rendering of 3D images a reality. For example, in the meeting, each participant is' projected 'in real time, creating perceptual hallucinations through XR, so that people in different cities feel in the same room. It is widely used in distance education, collaborative design, telemedicine, telecommuting, advanced 3D simulation and training, and national defense.
After 2030, there will be millions of self driving vehicles connected to the network in the world, and transportation and logistics will be more efficient. These vehicles include driverless cars running between homes, schools and workplaces, as well as automatic trucks or UAVs transporting goods. Each vehicle will be equipped with many sensors, including camera, laser scanner, odometer and terahertz radar. The algorithm must quickly fuse and generate the surrounding environment map, including other vehicles, pedestrians, animals and other information that may collide.
Performance exceeds 5g 100 times
The white paper believes that, similar to the previous mobile communication technology upgrades from 1g to 5g, 5g will improve 10 to 100 times compared with most performance indicators of 6G.
The white paper gives several key indicators to measure 6G Technology: the peak transmission speed reaches 100gbps-1tbps, while 5g is only 10gpbs; The indoor positioning accuracy is 10cm and the outdoor positioning accuracy is 1m, which is 10 times higher than 5g; The communication delay is 0.1 ms, which is one tenth of 5g; Ultra high reliability, with interruption probability less than one in a million; Ultra high density, the density of connecting equipment reaches more than 100 per cubic meter. In addition, 6G will use terahertz band communication, and the network capacity will be greatly improved.
In terms of coverage, 6G wireless network is no longer limited to the ground, but will realize the seamless connection of ground, satellite and airborne networks. In terms of positioning accuracy, the traditional GPS and cellular multipoint positioning accuracy is limited, which is difficult to realize the accurate deployment of indoor items, and 6G is enough to realize the high-precision positioning of Internet of things equipment. At the same time, 6G will be deeply integrated with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Intelligent sensing, intelligent positioning, intelligent resource allocation and intelligent interface switching will become a reality, and the degree of intelligence will rise significantly.
Technical problems still need to be solved
The high performance of 6G is very attractive, but there are many technical problems to be solved. The first challenge is to overcome the immature terahertz communication technology and realize the ideal communication rate; With the increase of band frequency, the antenna volume will become smaller and smaller. When the frequency reaches 250ghz, the area of 4 square centimeters is enough to install 1000 antennas, which is a great challenge to the integration of electronics, new materials and other technologies.
The white paper believes that by 2030, the digital world will be deeply integrated with the physical world, and people's lives will increasingly rely on reliable network operation, which puts forward higher requirements for the security of communication networks. 6G networks should have the ability to mitigate and resist network attacks and trace the source of attacks.
The arrival of the 6G era will bring the interconnection of all things and generate massive data information. On the one hand, these data are related to personal and corporate privacy, and reliable data protection is the premise of 6G promotion and application; On the other hand, real-time processing of these data requires mature edge computing technology, and edge computing also faces problems such as limited data access, insufficient computing power and storage capacity of devices.
Marty & middot, head of '6G flagship program' at olu University; Ratwaho said in the white paper release statement that the root of 6G is data. The way wireless networks collect, process, transmit and consume data will promote the development of 6G.