6G , the sixth-generation mobile communication standard, is also known as the sixth-generation mobile communication technology. The main promotion is the development of the Internet of Things. The transmission capacity of 6G may be 100 times higher than that of 5G , and the network delay may also be reduced from milliseconds to microseconds . The academic and industrial circles agree that 6G will be introduced to the market in 2030 .
Why do you start 6G research before buying a 5G mobile phone?
1. First of all, theoretical research is always ahead of practical application.
2. Seize the opportunity. In the communication industry, whoever defines the industry standard has the right to speak and profit.
Lessons learned : Qualcomm and Huawei settled a licensing dispute and signed a long-term agreement. The specific content is: Huawei will pay Qualcomm a one-time payment of US$1.8 billion, which will be used to pay for previously unpaid patent license fees. Qualcomm also said that while Huawei is now banned from buying Qualcomm chips, it has resumed paying licensing fees for wireless technology. In addition, Huawei has also reached a multi-year agreement with Qualcomm to obtain Qualcomm's authorization to use its related patented technology. Some netizens don't understand, isn't it that Huawei has a lot of 5G technology patents? It was also said before that it would charge patent licensing fees to American companies, so why should it give Qualcomm money? It turns out that Qualcomm actually participated in technology earlier than Huawei, and has a large number of 2G, 3G, and 4G patents, which have formed patent technical barriers. All mobile phone manufacturers need to pay a certain fee to Qualcomm, even if Meizu did not use Qualcomm before. For chips, Qualcomm also needs to pay patent licensing fees, because Meizu mobile phones also need to support 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, and Qualcomm can lie down and collect money. Because if Qualcomm charges a patent fee of 3.25%~5% of the sales price of each phone, based on Huawei's current annual sales of nearly 200 million mobile phones in the global market, the patent fee that can be collected is very high.
Official announcement : On November 3, 2019, the Ministry of Science and Technology, together with the Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Natural Science Foundation of China organized a 6G technology research and development launch meeting in Beijing. The meeting announced the establishment of a national 6G technology research and development promotion working group and a general expert group. Among them, the promotion working group is composed of relevant government departments, whose responsibility is to promote the implementation of 6G technology research and development; the general expert group is composed of 37 experts from universities, research institutes and enterprises, and is mainly responsible for proposing 6G technology research layout suggestions and technical demonstrations. Provide consultation and suggestions for major decisions. The establishment of the 6G technology research and development promotion working group and the general expert group marks the official launch of my country's 6G technology research and development work.
Therefore, the research and development of 6G is not only a battle for profits in the communications industry, but also an important bargaining chip in the national game.
From a technical point of view, what can the current technological development of communication support us in 6G?
1. Ubiquitous intelligence and collective AI
The communication that many people expect is invisible to users, that is to say, no matter when and where anyone goes, they can transmit information as they like. This is one of the great prospects of the entire communication industry, "ubiquitous communication". But this communication vision is not linked to real-world experience. From the perspective of personal needs, everyone actually expects their living environment to be smarter, which is why the concepts of smart cities, smart homes, and smart communities are flourishing.
In the next ten years, the communication industry generally believes that human life will show the widespread deployment of smart devices that can make optimal decisions with minimal human intervention. Everything around us will be so intelligent that it may even be able to intelligently manipulate codecs, signal processing, and sensory communication structures. It is also based on this judgment that almost all 6G papers currently believe that AI will become an indispensable part of 6G , thus forming "ubiquitous intelligence".
On the other hand, with the widespread deployment of smart devices and increasingly powerful terminal computing capabilities , the training and reasoning of AI models will likely be distributed to micro base stations or network edge nodes (such as fog-RAN). AI training and reasoning may become mainstream in the future. This is contrary to the current 5G network that does not consider AI training too much. In 6G, "collective AI" is likely to be realized --- each terminal is expected to train part of the model, and then integrate the model after it is transmitted to the data center through the network.
In this way, low-latency, high-bandwidth communication technologies are used to intelligently combine the original single device to form a smart device group , and group decision-making is used to achieve more reliable and efficient "ubiquitous intelligence".
2. Endogenous network security
The security of the current communication system mainly comes from the security protocols at different levels of the network, such as the encryption protocol that is very common to everyone. The application layer mainly uses the HTTPS protocol, and the transport layer may use the SSH protocol----this is a "plug-in" and 'patch' thinking,
The "plug-in" security configuration is not bad, but because the basic network itself is not designed with security standards in mind, the current mobile communication system temporarily faces many challenges and threats in terms of identity authentication and access control. In fact, this threat is one of the important reasons why physical SIM cards have not been replaced by eSIM cards.
3. Communication perception integration based on radar context
From the perspective of the two major applications of the entire electronic engineering industry, radar and communication itself, there is a trend of integration.
The integration mentioned by the author here does not only refer to the integration of electronic equipment or electromagnetic wave launch platforms. In fact, with the rapid development of millimeter-wave radars, more and more millimeter-wave radars are showing a trend of miniaturization and civilian use. Many radars Also small enough to be embedded in user equipment.
For example, Google's Project Soli——Google makes millimeter-wave radar into a chip and embeds it in a mobile phone terminal, so that gestures can be recognized and the mobile phone can be operated in the air.
On the other hand, 5G China Communication itself is exploring the commercial feasibility of the millimeter wave frequency band . It is believed that as the entire millimeter wave industry chain becomes more and more mature, the cost of millimeter wave communication equipment is expected to be greatly reduced within ten years. In this way, in 6G, communication and radar radio frequency are expected to appear in the same user terminal at the same time, and thanks to the strong directionality and low diffraction capability of electromagnetic waves in the millimeter wave frequency band , the signal processing of the entire communication is getting closer to radar signal processing. ----- This is the basis of the trend of communication perception integration .
Transmitting a waveform simultaneously completes the communication and sensing functions , which can not only meet the requirements of future IoT devices for body environment perception, but also meet the basic needs of future IoT device communication, and at the same time reduce costs, which can be said to kill three birds with one stone . If we think a little deeper, when radar and communication equipment exist on the same terminal, radar can provide basic information for communication. For example, users can identify and locate potential communication objects through the observation of radar equipment, making it more convenient Complete communication algorithms such as beamforming, or call more physical layer security strategies to protect communications from interference.
4. Programmable radio environment based on smart metamaterials
5. Large-capacity battery + low-power terminal solution
is not just a communication technology. Strong, so I will take this item out separately.
In every generation of communication, we believe that the capabilities of user equipment define each generation of communication equipment, and this is still the case for 6G. In this article, we believed at the beginning that 6G is likely to be deeply integrated with AI, which puts forward relatively high computing and power consumption requirements for user equipment, and user equipment often consumes more power than before. Traditional transceiver components are mainly based on semiconductor materials, such as silicon and gallium arsenide (GaAs), which generate a lot of heat, but the power consumption ratio of relatively low CMOS amplifiers is often difficult to improve beyond 300GHz, which means that they It is difficult to support the large bandwidth and computing-intensive applications of 6G.
In fact, judging from another technical route, large-capacity batteries may not necessarily come true, but at least fast charging and charging are in full swing, which is another ecology. Perhaps if one day our mobile phones can be charged quickly anywhere, large-capacity batteries may not really be needed.