What exactly is 6G and how much of a leap forward would it be?
Prof Simon Cotton, director for the Centre for Wireless Innovation in Belfast, is part of a team already looking beyond 5G into the world of 6G.
While some network providers are claiming that there is ‘no demand’ yet for 5G among consumers, elsewhere the rate of 5G adoption is increasing. However, research claims that it will not be until 2025 when the internet standard really starts making a real impression.
And yet, 5G is not the limit of where the technology can go, with some already looking ahead to 6G. One group looking at the concept in great depth is the Centre for Wireless Innovation (CWI), based at Queen’s University Belfast. Founded in 2016, the centre has rapidly gained international recognition as a leader in the area of physical layer wireless technologies.
In the space of three years, it has moved in the Academic Ranking of World Universities’ global ranking for telecom engineering from 150th to 28th. Siliconrepublic.com caught up with CWI’s director, Prof Simon Cotton, to find out more about its work.
Read full article here: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/6g-explained-simon-cotton-qub-cwi
What makes 5G at frequencies above 20GHz so important to smart cities?
The millimetre wave frequency band will provide massive connectivity to cellular users – both humans and machines – with very high bandwidth compared to that offered in 4G networks or early-stage 5G, below 6GHz.
With the concept of massive MIMO, the possibility to beam the bandwidth narrowly and precisely to each end-user is there, instead of scattering it everywhere within a cell.
What exactly is 6G and how much of a leap forward would it be?
This is the overall term for future mobile networks to deploy in the decade after 2030, following 5G. It is still very early days. New concepts are taking shape and new theories are being discussed among communication scientists to offer even more bandwidth and less latency than in 5G networks.
One of those concepts is called cell-free massive MIMO. The researchers at CWI are leading the thinking on this, whereby mobile networks will not rely on cells for their configuration and topology, but on millions of smaller devices – called access points – about the size of a Wi-Fi router. There are, however, years of computation, probabilistic modelling and experimentation needed to develop the concept that can work in the real world. Frequency bands used in 6G will most probably be those beyond 90 GHz.