White Paper on RF enabling 6G – opportunities and challenges from technology to spectrum
Executive Summary
Many visions of 6G and the evolution of data rates in wireless systems in general are directing their vectors toward Tbps communications by 2030. This target, with the important goal of sustainable development in the future world, will inevitably lead to many questions within the RF community about whether this will be feasible at all, and how. As the same question is also raised by other experts from various fields, this paper will examine the challenges and opportunities before us from many perspectives. It is evident that 6G will not only be extremely high-speed communications. For example, the existing wireless infrastructure and new solutions in ultra-low power communications will also live and evolve, further enriching the fabric of wireless systems serving an even wider spread of applications.
6G is also expected to merge communications and sensing in a new way, and the wide bandwidth needed for data will also benefit many high-precision sensing applications. Multi-use, scalability, and energy efficiency will be of the utmost importance, and the tradeoffs will be neither straightforward nor easy to implement, or even understand, without a deep dive into key technologies. These are evolving mostly from the well-established solutions in the market, but at the same time, the need for something completely new is evident. The gap between radio and optical communications is also narrowing, potentially answering some of the concerns.
This white paper will not only discuss the opportunities but also the serious challenges that are foreseeable in the technology community. These may slow down, or in the worst case even block, some of the development paths. How we cope with such threats and use the existing opportunities in the engineering process from early research to final products in the current landscape is one of the key questions that will be asked by the RF community. At the end of this paper, a list of refined questions will be shared. These are not for the RF community alone, but for experts working in various disciplines and stakeholders that are together building the future of 6G enabled by radio technologies.
Read the Full Paper in Jultika
List of Contributors
Editor in Chief:
Aarno Pärssinen, University of Oulu, Finland
Chapter Editors:
Mohamed-Slim Alouini, KAUST, Saudi Arabia
Markus Berg, University of Oulu, Finland
Thomas Kürner, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany
Pekka Kyösti, University of Oulu, Finland
Marko E. Leinonen, University of Oulu, Finland
Marja Matinmikko-Blue, University of Oulu, Finland
Earl McCune, former Eridian, USA (*
Ullrich Pfeiffer, University of Wuppertal, Germany
Piet Wambacq, imec & Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Contributors:
Shuhei Amakawa, University of Hiroshima, Japan
Zahid Aslam, SIRADEL, ENGIE Group, France (now with SKYFive)
Jim Buckwalter, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Stefano Caputo, University of Florence, Italy
Abdelaali Chaoub, Institut National des Postes et Télécommunications (INPT), Morocco
Yunfei Chen, University of Warwick, UK
Yoann Corre, SIRADEL, ENGIE Group, France
Minoru Fujishima, University of Hiroshima, Japan
Yang Ganghua, Huawei, France
Steven Gao, University of Kent, UK
Janusz Grzyb, University of Wuppertal, Germany
Chong Han, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Greg Jue, Keysight, USA
Joonas Kokkoniemi, University of Oulu, Finland
Zhengrong Lai, GDCNI Guangdong Communications and Networks Institute, China
Yinggang Li, Ericsson, Sweden
Mike Millhaem, Keysight, USA
Ingrid Moerman, imec & Ghent University, Belgium
Lorenzo Mucchi, University of Florence, Italy
Sami Myllymäki, University of Oulu, Finland
Roger Nichols, Keysight, USA
Ilja Ocket, IMEC, Belgium
Malcolm Robertson, Keysight, USA
Mark Rodwell, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
*) The chapter editor passed away during the preparation of this white paper.