When 4G was just developed, Huawei, Nokia and Ericsson were already conducting pre-research on 5G technology. The research and development cycle of each generation of communication technology takes about 10 years. In fact, as early as April, the University of Oulu hosted the world's first 6G summit. The theme of the summit is "Paving the way for the arrival of 6G".
According to this white paper, the 6G network will come out around 2030, and its vision is ubiquitous wireless intelligence, which means that the 6G network will cover all corners of the world through wireless technology and provide more intelligent sensing services and applications for human society.
After upgrading each generation of mobile communication network, its performance will be improved by 10- 100 times, and the performance of 6G will certainly be improved by 10- 100 times on the basis of 5G, so the specific technical indicators will undergo the following new changes:
The maximum transmission rate of a single user is 1 TB. PS5G will expand from below 6GHz to millimeter wave band, and 6G will enter the terahertz (THz) era, and the network capacity will be greatly improved.
The network delay will reach 0. 1ms (the extreme industrial control scene), the positioning accuracy will reach centimeter level, and the synchronization delay of equipment will reach hundreds of units per cubic meter within1μ s. 6G will also have the characteristics of super security, super reliability, data privacy protection, artificial intelligence and wireless network integration.
Professor Pouttu of the University of Finland said that people have already achieved interconnection, so the promise of 5G or 6G will be to connect more objects. In terms of delay, the near-real-time connection of 5G has not been completely solved: for some "time-critical" applications, the delay of millisecond (ms) level is not good enough, so there is still great potential to upgrade communication capabilities. When a large amount of data needs to be processed at the beginning, the communication rate of TB/s level can be reached at the beginning. When the data rate increases, the frequency also needs to increase, ranging from 100GHz to terahertz (THz) frequency.
In the 6G era, edge computing will become the development trend. Faced with a huge number of Internet of Things nodes and massive data, only by improving the edge data computing and processing capabilities can we meet the needs of the intelligent era of Internet of Everything.
We call the small-scale cloud data center which is distributed at the edge of the network and provides real-time data processing, analysis and decision-making as edge cloud. Edge cloud is located between the terminal of the Internet of Things and the central cloud, and it is the nerve center of edge computing.
With the development of edge computing, through the widely distributed edge cloud, the computing and intelligence of user terminals can move up to the edge, which can release the computing pressure of terminals, make their power consumption lower and lighter, and accelerate the prosperity of VR and other applications.
Thanks to the further development of new technologies such as edge computing, many end products will be reshaped or eliminated in the 6G era. With the arrival of 6G technology, augmented reality (XR) will replace mobile phones. XR is a general term for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR).
In the 5G era, technologies such as VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality) and MR (Mixed Reality) have been further developed. In the 6G era, they will become more mature, and different types of new devices will replace smart phones as the main tools for human work and entertainment.
Although the 6G white paper published by the University of Oulu is only a prospect for the future, in fact, many countries have made certain predictions about 6G, thinking of winning the dominant position of 6G in advance, thus becoming the leader of the global economy in the 6G era.
For example, NTT DoCoMo in Japan should have a clear plan for the development of 6G, and it has already been implemented. It regards 6G as an evolutionary version of 5G, that is, to further improve the transmission rate and information capacity and expand the network coverage. They have paid attention to the energy consumption of 6G big data processing, and paid more attention to low-energy and low-cost applications.
The University of Wuppertal in Germany proposed a very specific terahertz communication technology. Researchers have built a complete signal transceiver system based on SiGe material, which can realize terahertz communication in 260GHz band with a distance of 1 m.. But after calculation, they think that if the lens antenna with a diameter of 6.5 cm is used, the communication distance can reach 100 meters.
Huawei believes that the 6G era will surpass the "Internet of Things" in the 5G era and realize the "Internet of Everything" (IoE for short), that is, the entire humanistic society is closely connected with the external physical world, so 6G data is not big data one by one, and it is likely that countless small data will be merged into big data.
Huawei proposed that in the communication dimension, 6G should be extended to land, sea and air and even underwater space in addition to higher speed and wider spectrum. In terms of hardware, the role of antenna is also more important. With the increase of communication frequency, the antenna will become smaller and smaller, and even each chip may have its own antenna, which requires higher and higher materials and processing accuracy. In terms of software, artificial intelligence will play an important role in 6G communication. In addition, Huawei even envisaged launching more than 10000 small LEO satellites to realize the idea of covering global 6G communication, and estimated the cost-9.9 billion US dollars. Huawei also plans to build a wireless communication network that can accommodate 1Tbps transmission rate by 2030.
However, no matter how different the 6G schemes proposed by different countries are, they are all around broad spectrum, high speed, ultra-low delay, ultra-long distance, ultra-low power consumption and the application direction based on AI. It is foreseeable that the future development trend of 6G will also focus on these aspects.
Many times, the development of technology often exceeds our expectations. Whether we can catch up with the pace of the times and reap the fruits of the times determines whether we can successfully seize the cusp of the times. Are you expecting 6G?