Tuesday 16 June 2015

Have researchers moved on past 5G on to 6G Wireless?


As I am active on multiple social networks including blogs, twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc., Its always tricky to be able to share information from one on to another. Some time back I tweeted about the 6G research that seems to have started according to an article in FT.

While I had a few retweets and interactions, I realised that its always challenging to search the tweets so I decided to add this in the blog post, always easier to look it up.

So the FT Article states that:

Even as 5G remains a distant prospect for most mobile users, some scientists have already begun to work on plans for 6G services in the future.

To an extent, terms such as 4G and 5G have become as much about marketing equipment as any single technology breakthrough, with incremental improvements to technical specifications often arbitrarily given names such as 3.5G or 4.5G.

But that has not stopped people from thinking about what 6G could look like — and in the UK at least, the prediction is for a “quantum” leap.

Britain has created a “national quantum strategy” to identify areas where advances in technology will have the greatest impact on daily lives in the future. The strategy was developed by the Quantum Technologies Strategic Advisory Board, a government funded agency, which oversees the £270m programme. 

One of the key goals will be the development of faster communications for mobile devices. The advisory board predicts that the market for quantum products and technology has the potential to become a £1bn industry, even if details of how mobile technology can use quantum theory — science at an atomic level — are thin on the ground.

So why did I suddenly think about 6G? Because I have had a few discussions where the research community feel that they should focus on technologies beyond 5G, something that would be a game changer and would change the way we do communications. To be honest, new ways of communications have been found (like LED-Fi / Li-Fi ) but they have not really been ground breaking.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions, add it as comments.

8 comments:

Dean Bubley (via 4G Evolution Linkedin group) said...

6G will be the home for all the new technologies which are too late (or rejected) as 5G candidates

Navnit Goel (via 4G Evolution Linkedin group) said...

It will be too early to predict contents of 6G as 5G is yet to evolve.

Christoph Goertz (via 4G Evolution Linkedin group) said...

What is planned and what will be really seen on the roads is a different story. Actually I liked the IMT approach for 4G saying each system which fulfills the (defined) IMT-advanced requirements can be named 4G.

Krzysztof Korzunowicz (via 4G Evolution Linkedin group) said...

I love the fact that one number is better than the other. Still it does not look as stupid as 7D cinemas. Yet.

Nathan Grossman (via 3GPP 5G Standards Linkedin group) said...

5G has not been defined in great technical detail. A functional definition of 5G is whatever carriers roll out next. So I don't think the question "Have researchers moved on past 5G to 6G?" has a lot of meaning.

Bill Shvodian (via 3GPP 5G Standards Linkedin group) said...

I don't know Nathan, maybe Zahid is on to something. If the IETF can take IP directly from IPv4 to IPv6 then why can't wireless technology go straight from 4G to 6G? Let's petition the ITU: "We don't want to wait. Give us 6G now!" Heck, like Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap would say, why don't we just crank it it all the way up to 11G?!

But seriously, as Nathan says, 5G has yet to be defined, so it is hard to say that researchers are moving past it. But it is good to see that researchers are looking far into the future. After all, most of the theoretical work behind digital signal processing was done long before it was technologically feasible to implement it.

Zahid Ghadialy said...

Nathan, Bill, its just an honest question. Agree that no one knows for sure what 5G will look like including air Interface technologies, spectrum bands, etc. Is there any point in focusing on something and calling it 6G?

Anonymous said...

The usual industry moronics. If you use the following simple rule :

Tech is (n+1)G means its best DL/UL bit rate is around 10x that of nG

there is no problem.

EDGE = 2.5G. HSPA = 3.5G. LTE = 4G.


So my 6G friends, ping me when your radio link is doing 10Gbps in the DL.