Tag: 6G

How is Nokia Testing 5G-Advanced and 6G?

Nokia Bell Labs and Keysight Technologies have partnered in order to verify the performance of 5G-Advanced and 6G transceiver (TRX) modules. Nokia is looking to accelerate research and development critical to supporting 5G-Advanced and 6G use cases. These are use cases which leverage millimeter wave (mmWave) and sub-terahertz (THz) frequencies to wirelessly transmit large amounts of data across short distances.

Nokia will be running tests using a sub-Terahertz (THz) test bed from Keysight. The 6G test bed will be used to test the performance of TRX modules, power amplifiers and antennas. Tests will be performed under both linear and nonlinear conditions. The network infrastructure components were designed by Nokia. The company accomplished this by leveraging complex modulation technology and D-Band (110 GHz to 170 GHz) and E-Band (60 GHz to 90 GHz) spectrum.

Keysight and Nokia recently demonstrated the 6G test bed in combination with Nokia’s RFIC and radio-on-glass technology. The demonstration was showcased at the 2022 Brooklyn 6G Summit last month. The companies outlined the use of the 6G test bed for evaluating the performance of an individual component or a cascaded series of components in an end-to-end system.

“Working with Keysight enables us to make significant progress in developing next generation wireless technology. Cross-industry collaborations are important in co-innovating technology that merges physical, digital and human domains to create immersive experiences that support meaningful interactions,” said Nokia Bell Labs Core Research President Peter Vetter in a statement.

Nokia seems eager that they get 6G right since they were a bit behind with 5G. In fact, in a blog post earlier this year, Nokia highlighted that it’s working closely with industry organizations, government agencies and academia to make 6G technologies a reality. Nokia said it was selected to lead major 6G initiatives in the U.S., and it’s leading the Hexa-X-II project in Europe that’s designed to lay the groundwork for 6G standardization.

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Why is 5G Advanced Important?

5G Advanced is the next step before we get to 6G. This cellular standard promises to enhance current 5G networks with organic updates, and will also introduce major new functionality primarily targeting enterprise networking. New features include Sidelink, Reduced Capability (RedCap) and advanced positioning. 5G Advanced will be specified by The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Releases 18, 19 and 20, after which 3GPP’s work will focus on 6G.

5G Advanced technology will implement learnings from the deployment of early 5G networks. It will likely become the mobile network powerhouse for many years to come, at least until 6G takes over. When 6G is the primary standard, it too will build on the foundation of 5G Advanced and 5G. Some of the improvements it will introduce are in new directions, particularly in the enterprise domain. 

5G positioning, RedCap and Sidelink are showing new methods of connecting devices and utilizing the network. This may lead to new use cases and applications, and will likely create new ecosystems. Indeed, according to ABI Research forecasts, 5G Advanced will start to proliferate in 2025, when advanced use cases and applications will start to enter the mainstream. The following chart illustrates 5G Advanced infrastructure forecasts from ABI Research’s latest reports.

5G Advanced is likely going to bring radically new features that aim to introduce significant value for enterprise applications. Things like positioning improvements that aim to ultimately reach <1 Centimeter (cm) accuracy in the future; Sidelink, which will allow a much more flexible deployment approach for on-premises deployments; and RedCap, a more efficient terminal for IoT applications.

Addressing as many of the Real-Time Location Services (RTLS) use cases as possible is something else that 5G positioning aims to accomplish. It will be done by tapping into pre-deployed 5G infrastructure used for communications, rather than deploying numerous RTLS solutions (e.g., Ultra-Wideband (UWB, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, etc.). These are often use case-specific and require heterogeneous equipment (e.g., tags, anchor points and gateways). Ideally, this would aid in the efforts to drive down the cost and complexity of location services. It would also enable much more scalable deployments of positioning use cases over the next decade.

RedCap devices are important to the creation of mobile services with the user positioned firmly in the middle surrounded by multiple devices that act as enablers (i.e. a smartphone or tablet, automotive, set of wireless earbuds, or a smartwatch). With a focus on experience, the design moves devices to function as hubs that can support multiple devices. This means a system-level design needs to support and expand beyond just the main hubs to address all device types. It is important that the industry focuses on the enablement of these 5G Advanced use cases and experiences to embrace the wider implications of moving the market from a device-centric to an experience-centric ecosystem.

5G Advanced is an important milestone to prepare the industry for 6G, which will focus on distributed intelligence, the blending of physical and virtual worlds, and the full use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) throughout the network. Several infrastructure vendors are now preparing the next wave of innovation in this domain, including Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, which are starting to promote 5G Advanced.

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How AT&T is Helping Pave the Road to 6G

With 5G networking becoming more widely available, we’re now learning more about future technologies – 5G Advanced and 6G. 

According to AT&T news, AT&T has asked the FCC for two, two-year experimental licenses that will be used to “demonstrate the functionality and capabilities” of these newer wireless systems. 

The carrier will be performing tests out of Austin, TX. Coincidentally, Austin is home to the University of Texas at Austin’s 6G research center, which is supported by AT&T and other companies like Samsung and Qualcomm.

“The advances in both wireless communications and machine learning over the past decade have been incredible, but separate,” said 6G@UT Director Jeffrey Andrews, a professor in UT Austin’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in a press release. “Coupled with vast new sensing and localization abilities, 6G will be defined by an unprecedented native intelligence, which will transform the ability of the network to provide incredible services.”

AT&T’s application will be to use the spectrum licenses for testing communications between mobile units and fixed base stations. These units will be placed both indoors and outdoors. Tests will be performed to verify if wireless links can be established between the base stations and the mobile user equipment at distances up to 5 kilometers. Their end goal is to gain valuable insights into how to optimize next-generation cloud-native architectures and technologies as well as develop new use cases using multi-Gbps throughput.

The licenses AT&T is asking for include the following spectrum bands:

  • 5.9 GHz to 8.4 GHz
  • 10.7 GHz to 15.35 GHz
  • 92 GHz to 100 GHz

The equipment used with these licenses must operate within higher spectrum bands. This includes the sub-Terahertz (THz) band, which is between 95 GHz and 3 THz. This band was made available for experimental licenses in March 2019 by the FCC. It was done as part of the agency’s Spectrum Horizons First Report and Order. 

The THz spectrum offers more benefits than GHz. It’s capable of delivering data-intensive, high bandwidth applications at super-fast speeds for a short distance. Similar to the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum though, a signal traveling in THz spectrum can only travel a short distance (typically between 100 to 150 meters). It has yet to be fully tested, but some believe the signal will be impacted by environmental conditions.

AT&T was not the first company seeking to use the FCC’s Spectrum Horizons experimental licenses. Test and measurement company Keysight Technologies was granted the first FCC Spectrum Horizons experimental license for sub-THz frequency bands. This was announced back in March. They weren’t specific, but the company said it would be using the license to develop 6G technology.

3GPP, a standards organization, is also working on 6G standards and is expected to be released after the next several years. It’s also expected that 6G will incorporate advanced antenna technologies as well as more efficient coding and modulation schemes and will likely deliver multi-gigabit download and upload speeds. Most of the industry players anticipate that 6G will incorporate sub-THz and THz spectrum.

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