Since the official start of 5G commercial use in China on October 31, 2019, the demand for more advanced and intelligent communication systems in various industries has become more and more urgent. Therefore, combined with the latest evolution trend of 6G technology, we can discuss what key application scenarios will be in the future of 6G.
The IMT-2030 (6G) Promotion Group believes that 6G will further build super wireless broadband, ultra-large-scale connection, and extremely reliable communication capabilities on the basis of these three typical scenarios, and expand new scenarios of perception and intelligent services, namely communication perception fusion and inclusive intelligence. In addition, the scope of 6G services will be further extended to the air, space and ground to achieve global three-dimensional coverage.
Super wireless broadband
Super Wireless Broadband is an evolution and extension of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) that will dramatically enhance the immersive human-centric communications experience with seamless coverage anywhere in the world. Typical application scenarios can include immersive XR, synaesthesia interconnection, holographic communication, etc., which have higher requirements than 5G in terms of peak rate, user experience rate, and spectral efficiency. At the same time, global coverage will support full-time and all-region wireless broadband access, providing seamless handover, high mobility, and high-quality user experience in the air-space-ground integrated network.
Typical applications include immersive cloud XR. Extended Reality (XR) is a collective term for Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), etc. Through cloud-based XR technology, the performance requirements of XR terminal devices will be significantly reduced, and XR terminals will be lighter, more immersive, and more intelligent, which will be more conducive to commercial applications. According to the calculation of the Virtual Reality Industry Promotion Association, in order for the virtual reality user experience to reach a fully immersive level, the angular resolution needs to reach 60ppd, the frame rate is not less than 120Hz, the field of view is not less than 130°, and each pixel is 12bit, and it can dissipate the dizziness caused by the focus conflict to a certain extent, and the throughput demand is about 3.8Gbps according to the compression ratio of 100.
Extremely reliable communication
Extremely reliable communication will be further enhanced on top of low latency high reliability communication (uRLLC). Typical applications include robot collaboration, drone swarms and various human-machine real-time interactive operations in the field of intelligent industry, full-featured autonomous driving in intelligent transportation systems, personalized "digital humans" in precision medicine and telemedicine surgery. Compared with 5G, 6G has better medium and high-speed data transmission and ultra-high-precision positioning capabilities, which can meet the extremely high requirements of machine collaborative interaction applications in terms of jitter, time synchronization, and stability.
In the future, the machine control scenario will realize the multi-dimensional collaboration between man, machine, and the environment, and gradually expand from smart factories to smart agriculture, smart cities, smart transportation and other fields, and from closed scenes to open scenarios, which require more accurate perception capabilities and more accurate control command execution, and put forward higher requirements for the reliability and certainty of communication.
Hyperscale connectivity
On the basis of 5G massive Internet of Things communication (mMTC), ultra-large-scale connection objects will include various devices deployed in smart cities, smart life, smart transportation, smart agriculture, smart manufacturing and other scenarios, and typical applications include remote meter reading, environmental monitoring, smart light pole interconnection, etc. Hyperscale connectivity scenarios are characterized by a large number of connected devices, most of which may generate only sporadic traffic. In contrast to the low rate transmission in 5G, which only supports large-scale devices, the transmission rate of 6G hyperscale connected devices will range from low to high.
Typical applications include digital twins. In the future 6G era, with the continuous development of perception, communication and artificial intelligence technologies, it will further evolve to the development stage of self-learning, self-optimization, and virtual and real symbiosis, so as to realize the virtualized twin digital world. Digital twins require 6G networks to have trillions of device connectivity and sub-millisecond latency requirements to be able to accurately capture subtle changes in the physical world in real time. Through the network data model and standard interface, supplemented by self-error correction and self-generation capabilities, the data quality is guaranteed. In addition, the 6G network also needs to reach the transmission rate of Tbps to ensure accurate modeling and simulation verification of the amount of data, through rapid iterative optimization and decision-making, and adopt centralized or distributed intelligent generation mode as needed.
Communication Sensing Fusion
The integration of perception and communication will provide diversified capabilities such as high-precision positioning, environmental reconstruction, and imaging, and greatly promote the application needs of ultra-high resolution and accuracy, such as ultra-high-precision positioning, high-resolution real-time wireless map construction, device-based or even device-free passive target positioning, environmental reconstruction and monitoring, gesture and motion recognition, and product defect monitoring.
Typical applications include multi-dimensional perception. Multi-dimensional perception is mainly to realize the detection, positioning, recognition, imaging and other perception functions of the target through communication signals, so as to obtain the surrounding environment information and complete the digital virtualization of the entities in the environment. Typical applications include precise positioning, environmental reconstruction, autonomous driving, etc.
Pratt & Whitney Smart Services
Inclusive intelligent services are a new typical scenario of 6G, which relies on the network to provide integrated communication and AI computing power for intelligent services that require efficient and distributed intelligent learning or inference. It will not only serve specific applications, but will also serve the entire communication system in the future, improving the overall performance and efficiency of the network. Typical applications in this scenario include image recognition, generation, and prediction in the process of digital twin data training and inference, robot collaboration to perform complex tasks, and knowledge transfer and skill pattern learning between humans and machines in intelligent interactions. Typical applications include smart interactions. In the intelligent interaction scenario, the agent will produce active intelligent interaction behavior, fusing various information such as voice, face, gesture, physiological signal, etc., to realize emotional judgment and feedback intelligence, which will lead to a significant increase in data processing. In order to realize the real-time interaction and feedback of agents to humans, the transmission delay should be less than 1 ms, the user experience rate should be greater than 10 Gbit/s, and the reliability index should be further improved to 99.99999%.
Finally, the evolution of 6G requires the success of 5G commercialization. Global mobile communications have entered the 5G commercial stage, looking back on the development of mobile communications, voice and SMS services have developed in the 1G to 2G era, mobile Internet services have been vigorously developed in the 3G to 4G era, and 5G will further expand the application scenarios from the mobile Internet to the Internet of Things. At this stage, whether 5G can be successfully used in vertical industries will determine whether operators have sufficient motivation to further promote the evolution from 5G to 6G. According to the current expansion of 5G industry applications, the IMT-2030 (6G) Promotion Group predicts that according to the existing 5G development process, the 3GPP International Standards Organization will start the development of 6G international technical standards after 2025, and realize 6G commercialization in about 2030.
In the future, 6G application scenarios may also change greatly. With the wave of large models that began at the end of 2022, Apple will officially launch the Apple Vision Pro at the end of 2023, and the innovation of technology applications has begun to accelerate compared with the previous two years, and there is also a possibility of great changes in the application scenarios based on the research summary of the IMT-2030 (6G) promotion group. (Written by Xu Haoshen)
Source: People's Post and Telegraph