Samsung has released a white paper on 6G network, outlining the company’s vision for the next generation communication system.
South Korea’s Samsung is one of the leading suppliers of 5G network to telecom operators in the United States and South Korea.
The Samsung white paper (download from the official link) covers various aspects related to 6G, including technical and societal megatrends, new services, requirements, candidate technologies and an expected timeline of standardization.
Samsung’s vision for 6G is to bring the next hyper-connected experience to every corner of life. Samsung Research, the R&D hub within Samsung Electronics’ SET Business, founded its Advanced Communications Research Center in May last year in order to accelerate research for 6G.
“While 5G commercialization is still in its initial stage, it’s never too early to start preparing for 6G because it takes around 10 years from the start of research to commercialization of a new generation of communications technology,” said Sunghyun Choi, head of the Advanced Communications Research Center.
Samsung expects that the completion of the 6G standard and its earliest commercialization date could be as early as 2028, while mass commercialization may occur around 2030. Both humans and machines will be the main users of 6G.
Samsung said 6G will be characterized by provision of services such as truly immersive extended reality (XR), high-fidelity mobile hologram and digital replica.
Samsung defines three categories of requirements that have to be met to realize 6G services – performance, architectural and trustworthiness requirements.
Examples of 6G performance requirements are a peak data rate of 1,000 Gbps (gigabits per second) and air latency less than 100 microseconds (μs), 50 times the peak data rate and one-tenth the latency of 5G. A comparison of key performance requirements between 6G and 5G is shown in the diagram below.
The architectural requirements of 6G include resolving the issues arising from the limited computation capability of mobile devices as well as implementing AI right from the initial phase of technology development and enabling the flexible integration of new network entities. The trustworthiness requirement addresses the security and privacy issues arising from the widespread use of user data and AI technologies.
The white paper also introduces candidate technologies that could be essential to satisfy the requirements for 6G. These include the use of the terahertz (THz) frequency band, novel antenna technologies to enhance the coverage of high frequency band signals, advanced duplex technologies, the evolution of network topology, spectrum sharing to increase the efficiency of frequency utilization and the use of AI in wireless communications.