Samsung unveils its vision for 6G – the Next Communication Technology in a white-paper called – “The Next Hyper-Connected Experience for All.”

Paving the way for a New World of Experiences that’s Next in the Communications Technology sharing the abridged version of the white-paper for you to know what and how technological advancements will disrupt and transform the very face of this earth which will be the “New Normal.” Samsung is set to accelerate the research for 6G with the vision of bringing the next-gen hyper-connected experiences to every corner of our lives in the future. Wireless communications technology has developed from the first-gen analogue communication, in which only voice calls were supported, to the ultra-fast 5G of today, and the generation change of this technology is now progressing rapidly which will become the foundation of a smarter age in which AI and robots will become an integral part of our lives.

According to Sunghyun Choi – Head of Samsung’s Communication Research Center, “Communications technology connects not just people but also devices and other things together. It will keep evolving to allow the exchange of content and ideas in new and exciting ways compared to the previous generations; current communication technology can process more data in a shorter time. “Network equipment is also undergoing evolutions to handle more demanding requirements of this technology trend.” Eventually, the industry is heading towards automation that can adapt to the complexity of advancing communication technologies and their operations to be able to raise the quality of service provided. Choi and his team are working on R&D, Standardization of core wireless communication technologies to enhance 5G business and enable future 6G business for Samsung.

With a commitment to Innovate, Samsung will be the frontier in the innovation to give the world a bold new future for wireless communication technology. Through collaboration among industries, academia, and research institution, and its commercialization of 5G, in partnership with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-R), Samsung has played a key role in developing the standards that define this new era of “ultra” experiences. Samsung will continue to be a global leader in Wireless Communications Technology. The 6G Vision – “Bring the next hyper-connected experience to every corner of life.”

The white-paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of various aspects related to 6G such as technical, societal trends, services, requirements and candidate technologies:

  1. Mega Trends driving technology evolution towards 6G:

    Applications that take advantage of wireless communications are expanding from connecting humans to things. Wireless communication is becoming a critical part of social infrastructure and people’s daily lives. Besides, the exponential growth in today’s emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automation, and Robotics usher in the unprecedented paradigm shift in wireless communication. These circumstances lead to the following four major ‘Megatrends’ advancing towards 6G:

    1. Connected Machines:

      Machine as the Main user. It is envisaged that the number of connected devices will reach 500 billion by 2030, which is 59 times larger than the expected world population (8.5 billion). By that time, mobile devices will take various form-factors, such as Augmented Reality (AR) glasses, Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, and hologram devices. Increasingly, machines will need to be connected through wireless communications. Examples of connected machines include Vehicles, Robots, Drones, Home appliances, Displays, Smart sensors installed in various infrastructures, construction machines, and factory types of equipment. As the number of connected devices grows exponentially, these machines will become the dominant users of 6G communications.

    2. Artificial Intelligence (AI):

      New Tool for Wireless Communications. In recent years, the rise of AI has pervaded various segments such as Manufacturing, Healthcare, Finance industries and wireless communications systems. Application of Ai in wireless communications holds the potential to improve performance and reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditure (OPEX). Although AI was not used when developing 5G. The potential benefits of AI application to wireless communication are promising and will need to use from the initial phase of emerging concepts and technologies for 6G.

    3. The openness of Mobile Communications:

      Substantial improvements to the computing power of general-purpose processors such as Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) enabled software-based implementations of network entities including core networks and BSs. This trend makes open-source software an attractive option to realize network functions as it can lower barriers to market entry, promote interoperability, and expedite development cycles on shared knowledge.

    4. Social Goals and Mobile Communications:

      With the growing significance of mobile communications as social infrastructure, Governments and International organizations expect 5G to play a pivotal role in ameliorating many social issues such as climate change, education inequality, and hunger. 5G networks can enable remote learning which could help address education inequality. Despite help from 5G social disparities continue to widen. The United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the plan 2030. Wide deployment of 6G will reduce differences in regional and social infrastructure and economic opportunities by providing alternatives to rural exodus, mass urbanization and its attendant problems.

  2. 6G Services:

    Representative of 5G services, i.e., enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC) will continue to improve moving towards 6G. Here we focus on the new 6G services that will emerge due to the advancements in communications and other emerging technologies such as AI, sensing, imaging or display. These new services will be introduced through hyper-connectivity involving humans and everything to provide the ultimate multimedia experience.

    1. Truly Immersive XR:

      XR is a new term that combines AR, VR, and mixed reality (MR). It has attracted significant attention and opened new horizons in various fields, including entertainment, science, medicine, education, and manufacturing industries. Technical development to realize XR is still in progress as new and innovative technologies are continuously emerging. The critical obstacle between the potential and reality of XR is hardware. In particular, these technologies require advanced device form-factors, such as hand-held components to support mobile and active software content. The current mobile devices lack sufficient stand-alone computing capabilities. Samsung believes these challenges can be overcome by offloading computing to more powerful devices or servers.

    2. High-Fidelity Mobile Hologram:

      With the unprecedented rate of advances in high-resolution rendering, wearable displays, and wireless networks, mobile devices will be able to render media for 3D hologram displays. A hologram is a next-generation media technology that can present gestures and facial expressions through a holographic display. The content to display can be obtained using real-time capture, transmission, and 3D rendering techniques. To provide hologram display as a part of real-time services, high data rate transmission, hundreds of times greater than the current 5G system is a must.

    3. Digital Replica:

      With the help of advanced sensors, AI, and communication technologies, it will be possible to replicate physical entities, including people, devices, objects, systems, and even places, in a virtual world. This digital replica of a physical entity is called a digital twin. In a 6G environment, through digital twins, users will be able to explore and monitor the reality in a virtual world, without temporal or spatial constraints. Users will be able to observe changes or detect problems remotely through the representation offered by digital twins. With the help of AI, digital replication, management of real-world and problem detection and mitigation can be done efficiently without the presence or even detailed supervision by a human being.

  3. Requirements:

    There will be new advanced services in 6G era, which require a tremendous amount of real-time data processing, a hyper-fast data rate, and extremely low latency, as discussed below. These new services can be characterized as providing ultimate experience through hyper-connectivity.

    1. Performance Requirements:

      To realize advanced multimedia services such as truly immersive XR, mobile hologram, and digital replica, 6G needs to provide a much higher data rate than 5G. While 5G was designed to achieve 20 Gbps peak data rate, in 6G, Samsung aims to provide the peak data rate of 1,000 Gbps and a user experienced data rate of 1 Gbps. To provide advanced multimedia services to a large number of people, the overall network performance needs to be improved, e.g., we can aim to have two times higher spectral efficiency than 5G. To provide the ultimate experience of delay-sensitive real-time applications such as interactive tactile internet, latency-related performance needs to improve significantly. Performance targets include air latency less than 100μs, end-to-end (E2E) latency less than 1ms, and extremely low delay jitter in the order of microseconds. In the 6G era, users will expect seamless, high-end services in their everyday lives, ideally with improved battery life. Considering the growing concern about environmental sustainability, the energy consumption of 6G networks should be minimized. Samsung intends to improve the energy efficiency of both the devices and networks by at least two times.

    2. Architectural Requirements:

      The architecture of 6G communication network should be developed so that it can resolve the issues arising from the limited computation capability of mobile devices. A possible way to achieve this is to offload computation tasks to more powerful devices or servers. To support offloading of real-time intensive computation tasks, hyper-fast data rate and extremely low latency communications are required. Understanding that there must be practical limits on the achievable data rate and latency, the communication network should be designed holistically, to utilize best computation power that can be made available by various entities in the network. We term this joint design “communications and computing convergence.”

    3. Trustworthiness Requirements:

      As discussed in megatrend 6G, the use of open-source software and personal user information will increase the openness of communication systems and hence increase the attack surface. This could make the whole system more vulnerable to security and privacy threats as described in the following examples. First, there may not be enough verification of open source software codes against possible security attacks. Second, the service provider’s access to user information will expose attack surfaces for leaking confidential user information and poses a severe threat to user privacy. Considering the increasing risk of security threats, Samsung expects that trustworthiness will become an essential requirement and will be implementing strong measures at hardware, software, and network levels.

  4. Candidate Technologies:

    The services and requirements for 6G presented in the previous sections pose various challenges on the development of the future wireless system. In this section, we introduce candidate technologies that could be key enablers to realize 6G. While we find these technologies quite promising and relevant, we will consider new technologies in the future and our view regarding the importance and usefulness of different technologies will naturally evolve as we proceed with our research.

    1. Terahertz Technologies:

      It is inspiring that in March 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened the spectrum between 95 GHz and 3,000 GHz for experimental use and unlicensed applications to encourage the development of new wireless communication technologies. The THz band includes an enormous amount of available bandwidth, which will enable extremely wideband channels with tens of GHz-wide bandwidth. This could potentially provide a means to meet the 6G requirement of Tbps data rate.

    2. Novel Antenna Technologies:

      To cope with the difficult propagation characteristics of THz band, it may be natural to enhance the massive MIMO technology that was introduced to support millimetre wave (mmWave) band in 5G. Since the THz band requires much more antennas than the mmWave band, there may be significantly more practical difficulties. In this section, we briefly review novel antenna technologies as possible alternatives.

    3. Metamaterial based Antenna and RF Front-End:

      A metamaterial is usually constructed by arranging multiple tunable elements (PIN diodes, varactor diodes, etc.) in repeating patterns, at scales that are smaller than the wavelengths [22]. Its precise shape, geometry, size, orientation, and arrangement enable smart properties capable of manipulating electromagnetic waves, e.g., blocking, absorbing, enhancing, or bending waves, to achieve benefits that go beyond what is possible with conventional materials.

    4. Orbital Angular Momentum:

      When light travels through space, electric and magnetic fields composing the light have their own oscillating axes perpendicular to each other. There are two types of rotations related to these axes, and these rotations can be observed as two types of momentum, namely, spin angular momentum (SAM) and orbital angular momentum (OAM). OAM theoretically could have multiple orthogonal modes depending on how fast the light can rotate around its propagation direction.

    5. Evolution of Duplex Technology:

      In conventional communication systems, downlink and uplink transmissions occur in a mutually exclusive manner either in the time domain (i.e., TDD) or in the frequency domain (i.e., FDD). Typically, the downlink and uplink receive fixed allocations of time-frequency resources in practical systems. In 5G NR, dynamic TDD was introduced to improve the duplex flexibility, thus making it possible to adjust the ratio between downlink and uplink time slots depending on traffic demand. While this is an improvement over earlier generations, there is still active research [29][30][31] into how to remove the restriction that downlink and uplink must use mutually exclusive time-frequency resources. We refer to this restriction as to the “mutually exclusive” principle hereafter.

    6. Evolution of Network Topology:

      Cellular BSs have typically been deployed with fixed locations and connected by fixed networks. With such static network topology and wireline backhaul and fronthaul, it is difficult and costly to establish additional BSs to accommodate an increase of data traffic or to fill holes in coverage. To Evolution of Network Topology TDD FDD Sub-band Full Duplex Full Duplex Downlink (DL) Uplink (UL) UL+DL Time-Frequency Candidate Technologies Mesh type network topology. Enable flexible network deployments; the mobile industry introduced support for network entities to connect to BSs via wireless connections, such as relay in 4G and integrated access and backhaul (IAB) in 5G.

    7. Spectrum Sharing:

      Spectrum sharing technology enables the use of spectrum by multiple entities. Exclusive licensees often underutilize licensed spectrum because they do not actively utilize it all the time. Allowing opportunistic use of the underutilized spectrum by others can make the best use of the limited and Spectrum Sharing HAPS Desert Area Terrestrial Network Coverage Non-Terrestrial Network Coverage UE BS Car UE Sea Area Satellite Candidate Technologies 31 precious spectrum resources, especially those at low-frequency ranges, e.g., below 6 GHz. These resources are critically important for guaranteeing the seamless coverage of mobile communications but are scarce. We also observe that regulatory bodies begin to consider deviating from the traditional exclusive spectrum licensing approach to achieve better utilization of the limited spectrum. Considering such trends, spectrum sharing technology is worth paying attention to.

    8. Comprehensive AI:

      AI receives much attention as a tool to solve problems that were previously deemed intractable due to their tremendous complexity or the lack of the necessary model and algorithm. In this section, we discuss a comprehensive AI system to optimize the overall system performance and network operation. In general, an overall network architecture consists of four tiers of entities: UE, BS, core network, and application server. Application of AI can be categorized into three levels, such as 1) local AI, 2) joint AI, and 3) E2E AI.

    9. Split Computing:

      Future applications, such as truly immersive XR, mobile holograms, and digital replica, require extensive computation capabilities to deliver the real-time immersive user experience. However, it would be challenging to meet such computational requirements solely with mobile devices, especially, given that many future mobile devices will tend to become thinner and lighter. For example, AR glasses should be as light, thin, and small as regular glasses to meet the user’s expectations. In order to overcome the limits of the computing power of mobile devices, we consider the concept of split computing that makes use of reachable computing resources over the network.

    10. High-Precision Network:

      To guarantee high QoE for interactive services with high data rate and low latency requirements, it is important to maintain deterministic E2E latency and to minimize jitter at the microsecond level. High-precision network (HPN) is a solution to achieve this when paired with massive connectivity supported by both radio link protocols and protocols above radio link. IEEE’s time-sensitive networking (TSN) defines mechanisms for the transmission of time-sensitive data over Ethernet.

6G Timeline:

Mobile communication systems have evolved over multiple generations from 2G to 5G approximately every ten years. Each generation has taken a big step and introduced new technologies. However, we note, as shown in Figure 22, the time spent for defining the vision and developing technical standards for each successive generation has shortened from 15 years for 3G to 8 years for 5G. This can be attributed to the accelerating growth of technologies and market needs for mobile communications over the past decades. For 6G, we expect ITU-R will begin their work to define a 6G vision in 2021. Taking into account the trend of speeding up of the development of technical standards for each new generation, we expect that the completion of the 6G standard and its earliest commercialization could happen as early as 2028, while massive commercialization may occur around 2030.

The mobile industry has achieved significant successes, from 2G to 4G. While it is still quite essential to work to ensure the commercial success of 5G in the coming years, Samsung believes it is the right time to start preparing for 6G. Shaping 6G will require many years, as they have seen with previous generations in the past. In this spirit, Samsung has presented their initial view of various aspects of 6G, including the megatrends, services, requirements, candidate technologies, and the timeline for standardization and commercialization.

To summarize, Samsung has proved that “Innovation” doesn’t stop despite the challenges the world is going through, and they will continue to support the industry which will enable the people at large to adapt to the ever-transforming “New Normal” which is the “Virtual Reality,” the reality of our Tomorrow’s businesses and the world. To read the white-paper outlined in detail by Samsung, please click here.