6G Wireless

6G will fulfill the needs of autonomous vehicles for the foreseeable future.  Looking ahead, we may find that our next generation of vehicles will require even more capabilities, communicating with more vehicles potentially in more dimensions. Consider flying cars. They will need every vehicle, obstruction and control surface be identified within a spherical range.

Reliable data connectivity is vital for the ever increasingly intelligent, automated and ubiquitous digital world. Mobile networks are the data highways and, in a fully connected, intelligent digital world, will need to connect everything, from people to vehicles, sensors, data, cloud resources and even robotic agents. Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks (that are being currently deployed) offer significant advances beyond LTE, but may be unable to meet the full connectivity demands of the future digital society. Therefore, there is a need to evolve wireless networks towards a sixth generation (6G), with several potential 6G use cases, initially for network backhaul.  There are numerous system-level perspectives on 6G scenarios and requirements, and select 6G technologies that can satisfy them either by improving the 5G design, or by introducing completely new communication paradigms.

Today's robotic systems are increasingly turning to computationally expensive models such as deep neural networks (DNNs) for tasks like localization, perception, planning, and object detection. However, resource-constrained robots, like low-power drones, often have insufficient on-board compute resources or power reserves to scalably run the most accurate, state-of-the art neural network compute models. Cloud robotics allows mobile robots the benefit of offloading compute to centralized servers if they are uncertain locally or want to run more accurate, compute-intensive models. However, cloud robotics comes with a key, often understated cost: communicating with the cloud over congested wireless networks may result in latency or loss of data. Robot Offloading determines how and when robots should offload sensing tasks, especially if they are uncertain, to improve accuracy while minimizing the cost of cloud communication.  6G wireless allows offloading as sequential decision-making for robots, using deep reinforcement learning, allowing robots the potential to significantly transcend their on-board sensing accuracy but with limited cost of cloud communication.

Spatial decision-making in time-critical situations requires effective and usable two-dimensional and three-dimensional (3D) cartographic products. Holographic displays allow decision makers to work with auto-stereoscopic maps without the hassle of interacting with complex user interfaces or additional vision hardware. Holographic production processes have advanced greatly in a short period and now support timely and full integration of digital 3D models in geospatial holograms. Academic researchers, decision makers, and domain experts are researching the usability and usefulness of these cartographic products with testing and design guidelines for effective geospatial holograms are being developed. 6G wireless facilitates these spatial relationships to allow real-time usability of these interactions.

Drones lack ‘sense and avoidance’ technology that would allow them to ‘see’ one another like radar technology for manned aircraft. Regulators say it’s a necessary element to have in place before tens of thousands of drones can make long-distance flights out of operators’ sight. 6G Wireless may help businesses using drones address the dangers posed by and to other vehicles, children, birds or other animals.  Drone communications has the potential of helping drones be safely controlled out of an operator's sight and enable additional flight adjustment by AI and potentially higher-order cloud connectivity.

Frequencies from 100 GHz to 3 THz are promising bands for the next generation of wireless communication systems because of the wide swaths of unused and unexplored spectrum. These frequencies also offer the potential for revolutionary applications that will be made possible by new thinking, and advances in devices, circuits, software, signal processing, and systems. Wireless communication and sensing applications above 100 GHz presents a number of promising discoveries, novel approaches, and recent results that will aid in the development and implementation of the sixth generation (6G) of wireless networks, and beyond. There is the  potential of wireless cognition, hyper-accurate position location, sensing, and imaging. By exploiting the Special Theory of Relativity to create a cone of silence in over-sampled antenna arrays can improve performance for digital phased array antennas. Also, new results that give insights into power efficient beam steering algorithms, and new propagation and partition loss models above 100 GHz.

There are already innovative uses being introduced on 5G Wireless that will be expanded with 6G.

Voice telephone service has progressed from the landline, to cellular phones, to fixed wireless services, and now to broadband connections using Voice over Internet (VoIP). There are possibilities of making these connections even more versatile, and wireless, with 6G.  We are currently working on the best replacements for the old school landline at The Home Phone Zone.

The Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC) has emerged as a promising alternative to conventional interconnect fabrics at the chip scale. Since WNoCs may imply the close integration of antennas, one of the challenges is the management of coupling and interferences. Research looks at instead of combating coupling, take advantage of close integration to create arrays within a WNoC. The proposed solution attempts to exploit the existing infrastructure to build a simple reconfigurable beamforming scheme. Full-wave simulations show that, despite the effects of lossy silicon and nearby antennas, within-package arrays achieve moderate gains and beamwidths below 90°, a figure which is already relevant in the multiprocessor context.

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Data centers are expanding rapidly but are limited by wired connections.   Cabling infrastructure is power-hungry, has poor re-configurability and limits innovation.  6G Wireless has sustainability, meets future demands, improves performance and reduces the need for cooling.  Wireless can be more fine-grained and greatly increases optimization possibilities.

To efficiently utilize ultra-short range wireless technologies providing extreme data rates at the air interface, the concept of “information shower” (IS) has been proposed to complement typical small cell deployments. Although the concept was introduced several years ago, the benefits of ISs is still an open question. Taking into account different THz bandwidth allocations resulting in different IS coverages and capacities and assuming applications capable of data prefetching, we estimate both user- and network-centric metrics as a function of input parameters including mobility of users. Our study reveals that initiating heavy traffic sessions upon entering THz ISs allows to offload up to 95% of traffic from long-range networks even for low IS sizes and high user densities as the THz IS data rates efficiently compensates for large inter-IS visit times. Such massive offloading also results in considerable improvements in mobile terminal energy efficiency as the fraction of time the radio interfaces have to be active drastically decreases.

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