Dozens of HD movies can be downloaded in the blink of an eye, and every phone can talk to the "stars".
Author/ IT Times reporter Mao Yu Hao Junhui
Editor/ Hao Junhui Sun Yan
Communication technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate. The transition from 4G to 5G, and then from 5G to 6G, is not only the increase in numbers, but also the impact of communication on the profound changes in the global economy.
At the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, which opened on June 26, 6G technology has become the focus of industry expectations, and industry leaders such as China Telecom, Huawei, and ZTE have successively demonstrated their latest progress in the field of 6G technology research and development.
Eight days ago, at the 104th meeting of 3GPP RAN, also held in Shanghai, the 5G R18 standard was officially frozen. As the first standard of 5G-A, R18 opens the second half of 5G and makes the process of formulating 6G standards increasingly clear.
In his speech at the opening ceremony of the MWCS2024, Zhao Zhiguo, chief engineer of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that he hoped that the industry would carry out in-depth research and development of key 6G technologies and lay a solid foundation for the formulation of 6G standards and industrial development.
At present, the general consensus in the industry is that 2030 will be a key node for the establishment and even commercialization of 6G standards, and most enterprises in the communication industry chain are formulating evolution plans for this target time.
6G latency
1000 times faster than you blink
"What does 6G mean?" When the reporter of "IT Times" asked the same question at the booths of various communication companies, "lower latency and faster speed" was a relatively unified answer.
Compared with 5G, 6G will achieve a qualitative leap in speed, and its core advantages are higher transmission rates, lower latency, larger capacity and wider coverage.
Theoretically, using the terahertz frequency band, 6G can increase the data transmission rate to more than 100 times that of 5G, reaching an astonishing tens of gigabytes or even terabytes per second, while reducing latency to the sub-millisecond level. This means that real-time HD video transmission, remote surgery, holographic communication, etc. have the opportunity to become a reality, and dozens of HD movies can be downloaded in one second, providing users with an unprecedented immersive experience.
At Bell Labs (China), a reporter from IT Times saw a low-latency experiment based on terahertz. The standard latency of 5G is milliseconds, that is, it can achieve a latency of 1 millisecond in the laboratory (usually about 10 milliseconds in actual use), while the target latency of 6G is less than 0.1 milliseconds. "Suppose we blink for 0.1 seconds, then the transmission delay of 6G is 1/1000th of this time." Cai Liyu, head of Bell Labs (China), explained.
Bell Labs simulates an industrial control system similar to laser targeting, with a high-speed rotating frisbee with a small hole and a laser transmitter and receiver 50 centimeters in front and 50 centimeters in front of and behind the disc. When the frisbee goes to a certain target position, a command will be triggered, and this command will be transmitted from the turntable to the base station and then to the terminal, and control the laser transmitter to emit the beam, if the beam emission number and the receiving number rise synchronously, indicating that the entire signal transmission closed loop is successful, if the receiving number is stagnant, it means that the reception fails, and the reliability is not enough.
The reporter saw that when the frisbee rotated at a high speed of 600 revolutions per second, the numbers on both sides rose synchronously and were completely consistent, which showed that in the terahertz band, the transmission and reception of the signal were very stable, and the delay was displayed between 75~90 microseconds, less than 0.1 milliseconds.
In fact, latency of less than 1 millisecond is a key threshold for many applications to become ubiquitous. Human tactile communication perception is usually millisecondary, and the time it takes you to see something and react is about 1 millisecond. As a result, if a VR device can't make people feel as fast as they do in the real world, it's easy to feel dizzy. The reaction speed of the embodied intelligent robot must also reach the level of a human in order to avoid falling or dropping things.
The application of 6G with lower latency and higher bandwidth will far exceed people's imagination, and once it is deeply integrated into all walks of life, it will bring unprecedented convenience and efficiency to human society. In the field of industrial manufacturing, 6G will promote the popularization of smart factories, realize instant communication between devices, improve production efficiency and reduce energy consumption; In the field of healthcare, remote diagnosis and treatment and precision medicine will become more feasible, and patients can enjoy higher quality medical services. Industries such as education, entertainment, and transportation will also undergo profound changes due to 6G, and personalized learning, virtual reality experiences, and autonomous driving will become part of daily life.
"The 6G network has ultra-high intelligence and perception capabilities, and realizes a new digital society and lifestyle through the high integration of people, things, and the digital world." Cai Liyu said.
No cellular architecture
Everyone can be a base station
In the same community, why can your mobile phone watch high-definition video, but my family can only stand on the balcony to "hey, hey, hey" even when making a call? Even with the development of mobile communication to the fifth generation, the entire network built based on cellular networks cannot completely solve the signal problem of users at the edge of base stations.
Shorter latency, faster speed, and higher reliability...... Behind the upgrading of mobile communication technology is a larger number of base stations. At the main forum of the 2024 Mobile World Congress Shanghai (2024MWCS), which opened on June 26, Zhao Zhiguo, chief engineer of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, announced that by the end of May 2024, the total number of 5G base stations built in the country has reached 3.837 million, accounting for 60% of the total number of 5G base stations in the world. Compared with the 4G era, in order to achieve the same coverage, the number of 5G base stations is at least 3~4 times that of 4G base stations. So, what about 6G? Will there be a need for more base stations?
According to the "IT Times" reporter, China Telecom and Shanghai Purple Mountain Laboratory are committed to building a cell-free architecture, with distributed massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) technology and multi-access point collaboration as the core, aiming to break the limitations of network power consumption and uplink transmission capacity in the 5G era.
At China Telecom's 6G booth, visitors were able to get up close and personal with the operational essence of distributed massive MIMO technology. Unlike previous models that relied on centralized base stations, the cell-less architecture uses a more decentralized layout of antenna units that are tightly connected to the central processing unit through the fronthaul network to serve the end user. The central processing unit plays a central role, coordinating the work of each antenna unit through complex signal processing algorithms, maximizing the use of spatial diversity effects, effectively reducing interference, and significantly improving network capacity and quality of service.
With the support of devices, the dynamic allocation of wireless resources is possible under the 6G cellular-free architecture. The leap in performance brought about by this innovative architecture was vividly illustrated in the numbers displayed at the booth: the spectral efficiency jumped from 5.55 bit/s/Hz to 18 bit/s/Hz. Telecom staff explained, "The original 5G used a large base station, and the non-cellular network is to split this base station, through multiple devices for joint signal processing, so that the signal source is closer to the user, and multiple user devices can share the network within the same time-frequency resources, which significantly improves the spectrum utilization and achieves seamless coverage and balanced performance improvement." ”
In the booth of H3C Group, the reporter of "IT Times" saw the baseband BBU (Building Baseband Unit) and RRU (RemoteRadio Unit) equipment without cellular network, which have proven their value in the era of 3G, 4G and 5G, and will become an important support for 6G technology in the future.
In an interview with the media at the beginning of the year, Liu Peng, a communications expert, pointed out that the BBU+RRU architecture not only changes the network architecture of mobile communications, but also lays a hardware foundation for the TDD MIMO multi-antenna system, provides a wireless cloud architecture for edge computing MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) and its business, and will play a key role in the 6G post-cellular era and emerging services such as holographic communication, metaverse, and digital twins.
"You can understand that in the future, everyone may be a small 'base station'." In Bell Labs, a similar concept is called "subnet in the network", Cai Liyu explained, due to the higher frequency of 6G, if according to the traditional communication evolution technology, the power consumption and density of the base station will reach an amazing level, in fact, it is not realistic, therefore, Bell Labs proposed to "sink" the network, through the collaborative transmission between multiple devices, greatly increase the reliability of the entire system, and connect multiple UE (user equipment) in a decentralized way, so the distance between AP and UE is short, low energy consumption, fast speed, and low power," For example, your mobile phone, watch, headphones and other sensing devices may be an access node in a small intranet, which is a base station in itself, which can be interconnected with each other at high speed, which is faster and safer than the current Bluetooth. He is very optimistic about the future application prospects of 6G in embodied intelligent robots, and transmits various sensor information on the robot at high speed through the wireless network, thereby reducing the computing power and power consumption of the robot.
With the gradual improvement of 6G network standards, the next-generation communication network is expected to usher in a disruptive architecture, bringing unprecedented communication experience to users around the world.
Star-ground integration
Every phone has a direct connection to the satellite
"In the future, 6G can achieve all-domain three-dimensional coverage of air, space, ground and sea, breaking geographical restrictions, whether it is deep sea or remote areas. The sustainable development of economy, society and environment and the development of technology have not only greatly enriched the application scenarios of communication, but also provided new solutions for emergency communications, environmental monitoring, global positioning systems and other fields. The staff of the telecom booth introduced.
Although the standard has not yet been formulated, in the vision of any manufacturer, the integration of satellite and ground is a must for 6G, and finally realize the integration of ground networks, satellites at different orbit altitudes (high, medium and low orbit satellites), and different airspace aircraft to form a new mobile information network.
"Our 6G innovation path is 5G system compatibility and 6G system integration." The staff of the booth of China Information Technology told the "IT Times" reporter that they are currently studying the unified system of satellite-ground fusion, through the spaceborne large-scale phased array antenna, enhance the beam-hopping signal, and integrate the satellite-ground frequency resources and jamming system to carry out the satellite-ground fusion system networking system.
To put it simply, it is to put the 6G antenna load on the satellite, and transmit signals to the ground terminal through the spaceborne base station, and finally meet the terminal non-perceptual service, that is, the mobile phone is directly connected to the satellite, and different from the existing telephone and SMS services, the future satellite-ground integration system can allow the mobile phone to switch between the ground 6G base station and the satellite 6G base station without feeling, and enjoy the same high-speed Internet service.
In the future, the integrated satellite-ground networking will not be a simple interconnection of satellites, aircraft and ground networks, but a deep integration of space-based, space-based and ground-based networks, and a service-oriented network architecture including unified terminals, unified air interface protocols and networking protocols will be built, which can provide information services at any place, at any time and in any way. At that time, the direct connection of mobile phones, cars and other terminals to satellites is no longer just an emergency service, but a universal Internet service.
6G could arrive in 6 years
At the booths of major communication companies, 6G technology was unveiled in various forms, showing its future potential. However, many people in the industry also said, "The 6G era will not come soon, and there will still be a long waiting period." "This is mainly due to the fact that 6G technology has not yet formed a unified standard, and its standard development involves complex international coordination and coordination mechanisms, which requires joint efforts on a global scale.
Yang Chaobin, Director of the Board of Directors and President of Huawei ICT Products & Solutions, said during the MWCS2024 meeting that 6G will not be commercially available before 2030, and the next six to eight years will still be the era of 5G-A. CITIC also revealed their 6G pre-research master plan: from 2025 to 2026, it will mainly conduct research on 6G performance requirements and evaluation methods and 6G technical solution experiments; In 2027~2029, 6G technology submission and evaluation and 6G system networking experiments will be continued; It is expected that by 2030, the 6G standard will be officially frozen.
At the 2024 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in the first half of the year, the United States and the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, South Korea and other ten countries formed the "6G Alliance" and issued a statement to reach an agreement and cooperation on 6G research and development, and work together to achieve open, free, global, reliable and secure network connectivity. But there are no Chinese companies among them.
"Despite the challenges, China has also ranked among the world's top echelons in 6G technology research." An industry source told the IT Times reporter. The exploration and practice of 6G technology marks that human society will enter a new era of communication in the future. It will not only reshape the way people are connected to each other and between people and things, but will also profoundly affect the global economic and social structure, which requires strengthening international cooperation to jointly promote the development and standardization of 6G technology.
"I think there will still be only one 6G standard in the future." A communications expert believes that the 6G system's complex networking system far exceeds the previous generations, including almost all the wireless systems that can be used by human beings, and requires the wisdom of all mankind.
Typesetting / Ji Jiaying
Photo/ IT Times Fei Feng
Source/"IT Times" official account vittimes
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