According to an IEEE paper, the post-pandemic future will offer tremendous opportunity and challenge in linking physical, digital, and biological worlds to transform the human experience as a whole. Considering this, 6G is anticipated to be a new architecture that will bring to life the vision of connecting all worlds into one.
Among the innovators of this new technology is the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) Next G Alliance. The organization recently announced the launch of its technical work program and the formation of the key working groups — National 6G Roadmap, Green G, Technology and Spectrum — that will fulfill its mission to drive North America’s leadership for 6G development and beyond.
Chaired by Fellow and Head of Radio Interface Group with Nokia Amitava Ghos, the National 6G Roadmap working group acts as a coordination point across all other working groups. Holistically, the National 6G Roadmap will establish the North American vision for the 6G marketplace and the broader environment by addressing the full lifecycle of research, standardization, development, manufacturing, and market readiness. Moreover, it will focus on sustainability and societal drivers shaping future wireless technologies.
On the other hand, the Green G working group is identifying how to minimize the environmental impact of future generations of wireless technology. Additionally, the Technology working group defines the specific technologies needed to fulfill the vision set forth in the National 6G Roadmap while the Spectrum working group’s responsibility involves exploring new paradigms for spectrum access, management, and sharing.
The road ahead for 6G is characterized by exciting opportunities from real-time communication and synchronization. From a network point of view, physical can be broadly associated with hardware and system-on-chip architecture; digital will be all about next-generation software architecture and digital twin representation, and; biological will include the biosensors and the new human-machine interfaces. Together, this will achieve the flexibility, simplicity, reliability, security, efficiency, and automation required to realize the variety of future applications of 6G to consumer and vertical industries.