Development of 6G communications has begun - what will it look like?
The 3GPP, the association of companies developing new communication standards, held the first meeting of the 6G RAN (Radio Access Network) working group in Bangalore, India, from 25 to 29 August. This means that active work on the sixth generation (6G) communication standard has begun. According to the programme roadmap, the organisation plans to determine the key technologies to be included in this standard by the end of 2026, and the deployment of the first 6G networks should begin in mid-2027.
Key technical points
The sixth generation of mobile communications will focus on increasing bandwidth and reducing latency, building on the ideas of 5G. The high-frequency range of 7-24 GHz is being discussed, which allows for high bandwidth but is not capable of long-distance transmission. The short-range standard will become a basic element in 5G from an optional option, although Qualcomm advocated the opposite model, in which long-range communication should still be the basic part, and faster short-range communication will be enabled as needed.
What the companies offered
17 companies submitted 19 technical proposals, including: Huawei, Xiaomi, Apple, vivo, OPPO, MediaTek, Intel, Ericsson, Qualcomm.
The companies made proposals in accordance with their own specialisation, for example, Xiaomi proposed to introduce hard "code books" that would reduce base station polling and exchange of technical information, which would significantly reduce the time to connect to a base station and switch between them while on the move.
Nvidia is also working on the problem of how the base station analyses the load from users - the company is going to continue improving the function of analysing the distance, direction and load from the user terminal to flexibly redistribute the repeater power according to the requests of each user. The base station should select the frequency range and other parameters that will best meet the needs of user terminals.
Apple has proposed to use the physical features of high-frequency waves to develop MIMO technology, which will greatly increase the bandwidth of communication channels; the company considers long-range communication in 6G to be exclusively optional.
What does this mean?
6G is already in active development, which means that in a few tens of months it will be approved and manufacturers will start producing first engineering samples of equipment, and soon the first commercial devices that will work in this standard. Judging by the main areas of work, 6G will be mainly focused on high-speed connections in crowded places, such as squares, supermarkets, and subways. The development of modern chips (and possibly AI - we'll see) allows us to build intelligent base stations that will flexibly allocate their resources.
Source: www.ithome.com
