‘Participants at the virtual 6G Wireless Summit shared their thinking on what 6G can do and what research is needed to get the underlying technologies in place.
The 6G Wireless Summit 2020 would have kicked off in Finnish Lapland this morning. Instead, the organisers have moved it online. Except for the lack of face-to-face conversations, the virtual event is a competent substitute. This may not be the first time that speakers needed to record their presentations, considering companies had been already pulling out other events over the recent weeks. By the time the Summit was scheduled to start, most of the keynote speeches and presentations at the technical streams had been made available online.
A year ago, when Team Finland introduced its 6G Flagship programme (then called 6Genesis) at Mobile World Congress 2019, what 6G was about was almost a blank slate. Twelve months and 800 peer-reviewed papers later, the direction of 6G is much clearer and the vision is increasingly shared by industry experts and their academic partners.
Having watched six of the seven keynotes (Huawei’s speech has yet to be made available by the time of writing), we can see a clear convergence between the speakers’ views on both what 6G is expected to do and where research investment should be made to make those expectations come true.
Even their 6G vision taglines could look rather similar. For example, Harish Viswanathan, Head of Radio Systems Research Group at Nokia Bell Labs, believed 6G will “unify the experience across physical, digital and biological worlds”, while Dr. Fang Min, Director of 6G Research & Collaboration in the ZTE’s Wireless Division, saw 6G “integrating the physical and digital world”.
The leading use cases expected for 6G are shared by most speakers. For instance, they all foresaw vastly increased interaction between human and intelligent machine. Both ZTE’s Dr. Fang and Ericsson’s Dr. Mikael Prytz, Head of Research Area Networks, called it “Internet of Senses”. This includes both enhanced brain-computer interaction, and, in the words of Nokia Bell Lab’s Viswanathan, in-body monitoring.
Another key use case referred to by the speakers is what Ericsson’s Prytz called Connected Intelligence, or what ZTE’s Fang called Internet of AI, meaning AI interacting with each other, intelligent machines serving other intelligent machines. Such a scenario will have strong implications on network designs which are now limited by human senses.’
Read more: Consensus On 6G Is Gradually Forming
