China Unicom Li Fuchang: Exploring the Future of Wireless Connectivity

Editor's Note:

New technology connects the new future! From cloud gaming to industrial robots, from smart light poles to driverless cars, digital transformation is on the rise! Full spectrum, high bandwidth, high reliability, low latency, low power consumption, artificial intelligence and ubiquitous access, these characteristics together create a solid foundation in the era of intelligent connectivity! Facing the era of intelligent connection, how should the industrial chain seize new opportunities, release new kinetic energy, and help new growth; to this end, C114 has planned and launched a large-scale topic of "New Technology Connects the New Future", inviting top industry experts to interpret for you and explore the future of wireless connectivity!

Wireless technology plays an important role in today's society, especially since the commercial use of 5G, the application of wireless technology has expanded from individual-oriented to production and society, and gradually practiced the goal of "5G changing society". Looking to the future, for 6G, wireless connectivity presents ten major development trends.

First, high-speed ubiquitous

The development of mobile communications from 1G to 5G has promoted the continuous improvement of service carrying rates. In the 5G era, with the popularization of high-definition video, 4K/8K live broadcasting, and 3D machine vision, the demand for speed bandwidth in services has grown rapidly. In the just-concluded 2022 Winter Olympics, whether it is the Bird's Nest Smart Venue, the high-speed rail studio, or the 5G cloud broadcast, etc., it is inseparable from the support of high-speed rates. In this context, more frequency resources need to be released to meet this demand, including both 5G mid-band frequencies and higher-frequency band resources such as millimeter wave, terahertz and even visible light. At the same time, wireless technology transmission also needs to continuously improve efficiency to meet this demand, which can be considered, including higher-order antenna technology, more efficient coding technology, etc., and even Shannon's limit breakthrough. With the increase of communication rates, the breadth of wireless access, that is, the ubiquity, is also increasing, mainly to meet the needs of the Internet of Things. Internet of Things services can be divided into low-speed, medium-speed, high-speed Internet of Things services, access to a lot of technology, NB-IoT, LTE-M, LoRa, Sigfox, etc., 3GPP 5G-Advanced is studying and standardizing RedCAP, can provide business capabilities comparable to LTE Cat4 capabilities (down 50 ~ 100Mbps), positioned in emerging markets such as cameras, wearable devices, etc., is expected to set off the Internet of Things boom again.

Second, the unity of space and space

In the future, wireless technology will break through the limitations of terrain and surface, extend to natural spaces such as space, air and land, eliminate the digital gap between remote areas on the ground and developed areas, and promote the harmonious development of digital social economy. The future-oriented air-ground integrated communication network is a typical heterogeneous network, which is a three-dimensional hierarchical, integrated and cooperative network based on the ground network and expanded by the space-based network and the space-based network, and the constellation satellites (including high, medium and low orbit), the high-altitude network (adjacent to the space platform and the aviation Internet), the low-altitude intelligent network and the ground cellular network jointly form multiple coverage. Non-terrestrial networks can adopt network architectures and key technologies that are the same or similar to terrestrial 5G to reduce costs and achieve interoperability through shared industry chains. The Tesla smartphone concept brings people unlimited reverie, but the real mobile phone direct connection satellite will gradually go to reality, further lift the shackles of human communication and communication by the natural world, and go to "poetry and far away".

Third, the experience is determined

The service experience of a 4G network relies on the network to do its best. With the integration of 5G with industrial scenarios and unmanned driving, the experience requirements of the network are getting higher and higher. This experience is multi-dimensional, including the determination of the rate, the determination of time, the determination of space, and so on. A combination of technologies is therefore required to create a network with the highest possible definitive experience. In terms of rate experience, it is necessary to adopt differentiated service technology to ensure the differentiated service experience of different industries, and to use multi-standard multi-domain aggregation technology to achieve multi-access and multi-mode integration. In terms of time determination experience, high-precision time synchronization technology is needed, and the integration of 5G and TSN networks is also required. In terms of space determination experience, it is necessary to continuously improve the accuracy of positioning and realize sub-meter-level positioning technology.

Fourth, flexible openness

Previously, wireless technology mainly served individual users, and the difference in network design was small. For 2B industry applications, it is necessary to achieve differentiated and customized services for users, and it is necessary to provide the ultimate elastic service to support business perception, emotion recognition tracking and prediction capabilities. This requires that the network needs to have the ability to quickly match requirements and customize and verify, support the management of the whole life cycle, and at the same time, it needs to be integrated into the business process as much as possible to achieve global and all-scenario control. We use technical features such as common platforms and microservices to meet the needs of rapid service deployment, timely optimization of functions, and efficient opening of capabilities. In terms of air interface technology, it is necessary to be able to support the cloud scheduling of resources, including frequency resource cloud, flexible time slot, flexible antenna configuration, and so on.

5. Synaesthesia fusion

Synaesthesia convergence integrates the network architecture, devices, and evaluation standards for communication and perception, realizing a set of devices to meet the dual needs of communication and perception. The process of wireless synaesthesia fusion in the future will present a process of gradual fusion of communication and perception requirements, architectures, and technologies, and this evolutionary process can be similar to the process of human genetic recombination, from complete independence, to partial integration, and then to complete integration. In synaesthesia fusion, it is necessary to refine the scenarios and requirements of demand fusion, and to think about the architecture at different levels on the basis of scenes and requirements, and also to analyze and study the typical technologies after fusion, and finally achieve the two-way promotion goal of synaesthesia fusion. In the early stage of synaesthesia fusion, it is expected that the initial perception will be based on the communication system, such as high-precision positioning, traffic management, UAV management, etc., and the subsequent realization of perceptual auxiliary communication and wireless sensing.

6. Digital Twin

The future wireless network provides a magic interconnection capability, and provides an efficient and reliable data channel, combined with subsequent robots and automation technology, using the reliable channel provided by the network to transform the world more accurately, and further open up the virtual to reality control channel for the digital twin world. With the enhancement of the capabilities of the wireless network in the future, digital cities, twin industries, smart healthcare and many other fields will be greatly advanced, and the digital twin world will gradually be realized.

7. Intelligent native

In the future, wireless technology will enable intelligent natives. Through multi-level deep integration with AI technology, network autonomy, self-regulation and self-evolution are realized without human intervention. At the same time, intelligent native features can also reduce the latency caused by data collection and transmission processes and information leakage hazards. In the future, the cloud, tube, and terminal of wireless networks will introduce distributed AI, so that the network can operate and optimize itself to become a fully autonomous driving network; add AI functions to each layer of the air interface protocol stack to enhance the flexibility of the protocol; replace the traditional statistical model with an AI model in the physical layer of wireless devices, transform the data processing module from a mutually independent design structure to a joint design structure, and improve network reliability, such as intelligent hypersurface technology (RIS) and so on.

VIII. Safety Endogenous

In the past, wireless technology was mainly based on security and plug-in security. In the future, wireless technology needs to take the confrontation of network attack killing chain as the goal, transform the plug-in security protection into endogenous security capabilities, and establish a deep global security protection system for physical hardware, storage data, network connections, operating systems and even application software, so that network attacks "cannot come in, cannot be changed, cannot go out, and cannot escape". The extension of the security concept will also be extended from security to the integration of security and credibility. In terms of network credibility, it is necessary to establish an intra-domain trust and inter-domain trust chain transmission mechanism from the underlying data to the terminal software and hardware, network transmission and network boundaries, to achieve self-evident innocence based on "no attack logic", and to provide a network-oriented trust system to the physical world, that is, network trust.

9. Green and low-carbon

Facing "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality", green is the background color of future wireless technology development. One is "green ecology", emphasizing the protection of natural ecology, enhancing the integration of communication equipment and the environment, while reducing the occupation of space and land resources; the second is "energy conservation and emission reduction", 5G network has implemented energy conservation and emission reduction strategies from multiple angles, for example, to achieve software and hardware decoupling to improve hardware utilization, wireless equipment to increase software energy saving methods, to achieve base station network level energy saving, etc. The future network will promote the development of wireless equipment to generalization and openness on top of the existing energy conservation and emission reduction programs of 5G, and improve the utilization rate of wireless equipment. At the same time, the hardware equipment uses more advanced low-energy materials, such as "diamond chips" and new transistors.

10. Co-construction and sharing

In the 5G era, the 5G network co-construction and sharing construction model implemented by Chinese telecom operators has achieved unprecedented great success, which has greatly saved CAPEX and OPEX. The "sharing" concept of future wireless networks more reflects the essence of sharing, that is, to serve more groups with limited resources. In terms of shared content, the future wireless network not only shares sites and equipment, but also shares other resources such as computing power and spectrum; in the scope of sharing, the sharing of future wireless networks will be extended from sharing between operator industries to sharing with other industries, so that sharing can promote win-win results.