A session on the future of 6G held at Mobile World Congress brought together experts from companies such as Samsung, the European Space Agency and Telefonica to share their thoughts on how 6G will unfold.
The first thing to note is that it doesn’t arrive immediately. Projections predict that only 6G will be in our hot little hands starting around 2030, so it’s best to temper your anger for now. The prospect is enough to stir our geeky minds. We’re talking about 100 times the capacity of 5G with sub-millisecond latency.
The panel was attended by Kimberly Trommler (Head of Thinknet 6G at Bayern Innovative GmbH), Yue Wang (Head of 6G research at Samsung Research UK) and Xavier Robao (European Space Agency Future Communications Project). Department Head), and Nicholas Courteris (Principal Investigator and Co-Director of Telefónica Research).
When asked if they had to pick just one most exciting aspect of 6G, the panel offered mixed views.
While it may not matter to most consumers, one aspect the panel got excited about was the significant reduction in energy consumption over 6G networks. This obviously means that his 6G can be deployed in a much wider range of scenarios than 5G, such as IoT devices. The other is real “edge computing” applications and much better cybersecurity.
The word that came up several times during the conversation was “convergence”. This was conceived not from an engineering perspective, as I expected, but in the sense of the convergence of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks (such as space) to provide seamless connectivity.
6G also promises greater resilience across the network. With 6G’s staggering bandwidth, virtual education via XR headsets could boom. Of course, this could mean a real boost to the UN’s sustainability goals (especially important for emerging economies).
The panel also highlighted how robust 6G networks will be from a consumer perspective. Did you know that the signal is cut off when you get on the elevator? His 6G with the ability to go “from 2D to 3D” and significantly improved device localization is expected to solve this thorny problem.
Smart labeling in the 6G environment means all kinds of products will be traceable. Yes, goodbye privacy, but hello to many utilities, especially in terms of things like supply change logistics.
Smart cities, holographic meetings and 3D mapping were all mentioned in the session.
But which one will be the 6G “killer app”? It was the Metaverse that was mentioned several times during the discussion, but he said one thing about getting to 6G “in a more holistic way.”
Applications include robotic precision manufacturing, self-driving car communications, and even brain-computer interfaces. “Kinetic content” and “AI-generated content” will be much more accessible on 6G networks, as will “digital replicas”. So, for example, medical students can be trained using holographic patients who can safely make mistakes as many times as they want.
6G also promises the concept of “Privacy Preserving Federated Learning” (ppFL). This allows multiple parties to train a single model without sharing raw training data. For example, the potential for cyber-attacks through neural networks may be mitigated by ppFL, where the system quickly learns to repel attacks. Another example is when you need to submit personal information about a hospital patient, but even non-anonymized data can pose a privacy risk. Federated Learning systems make this possible.
But how can we achieve this?
Moving from 5G to 6G seems much easier than moving from 3G to 4G. Much of the hard work has already been done, and the network, at least, looks set for this brave new world…
