3,075 research outputs found
6G Vision, Value, Use Cases and Technologies from European 6G Flagship Project Hexa-X
While 5G is being deployed and the economy and society begin to reap the associated benefits, the research and development community starts to focus on the next, 6th Generation (6G) of wireless communications. Although there are papers available in the literature on visions, requirements and technical enablers for 6G from various academic perspectives, there is a lack of joint industry and academic work towards 6G. In this paper a consolidated view on vision, values, use cases and key enabling technologies from leading industry stakeholders and academia is presented. The authors represent the mobile communications ecosystem with competences spanning hardware, link layer and networking aspects, as well as standardization and regulation. The second contribution of the paper is revisiting and analyzing the key concurrent initiatives on 6G. A third contribution of the paper is the identification and justification of six key 6G research challenges: (i) “connecting”, in the sense of empowering, exploiting and governing, intelligence; (ii) realizing a network of networks, i.e., leveraging on existing networks and investments, while reinventing roles and protocols where needed; (iii) delivering extreme experiences, when/where needed; (iv) (environmental, economic, social) sustainability to address the major challenges of current societies; (v) trustworthiness as an ingrained fundamental design principle; (vi) supporting cost-effective global service coverage. A fourth contribution is a comprehensive specification of a concrete first-set of industry and academia jointly defined use cases for 6G, e.g., massive twinning, cooperative robots, immersive telepresence, and others. Finally, the anticipated evolutions in the radio, network and management/orchestration domains are discussed
Convergent Communication, Sensing and Localization in 6G Systems: An Overview of Technologies, Opportunities and Challenges
Herein, we focus on convergent 6G communication, localization and sensing systems by identifying key technology enablers, discussing their underlying challenges, implementation issues, and recommending potential solutions. Moreover, we discuss exciting new opportunities for integrated localization and sensing applications, which will disrupt traditional design principles and revolutionize the way we live, interact with our environment, and do business. Regarding potential enabling technologies, 6G will continue to develop towards even higher frequency ranges, wider bandwidths, and massive antenna arrays. In turn, this will enable sensing solutions with very fine range, Doppler, and angular resolutions, as well as localization to cm-level degree of accuracy. Besides, new materials, device types, and reconfigurable surfaces will allow network operators to reshape and control the electromagnetic response of the environment. At the same time, machine learning and artificial intelligence will leverage the unprecedented availability of data and computing resources to tackle the biggest and hardest problems in wireless communication systems. As a result, 6G will be truly intelligent wireless systems that will provide not only ubiquitous communication but also empower high accuracy localization and high-resolution sensing services. They will become the catalyst for this revolution by bringing about a unique new set of features and service capabilities, where localization and sensing will coexist with communication, continuously sharing the available resources in time, frequency, and space. This work concludes by highlighting foundational research challenges, as well as implications and opportunities related to privacy, security, and trust
Convergent communication, sensing and localization in 6g systems: An overview of technologies, opportunities and challenges
Herein, we focus on convergent 6G communication, localization and sensing systems by identifying key technology enablers, discussing their underlying challenges, implementation issues, and recommending potential solutions. Moreover, we discuss exciting new opportunities for integrated localization and sensing applications, which will disrupt traditional design principles and revolutionize the way we live, interact with our environment, and do business. Regarding potential enabling technologies, 6G will continue to develop towards even higher frequency ranges, wider bandwidths, and massive antenna arrays. In turn, this will enable sensing solutions with very fine range, Doppler, and angular resolutions, as well as localization to cm-level degree of accuracy. Besides, new materials, device types, and reconfigurable surfaces will allow network operators to reshape and control the electromagnetic response of the environment. At the same time, machine learning and artificial intelligence will leverage the unprecedented availability of data and computing resources to tackle the biggest and hardest problems in wireless communication systems. As a result, 6G will be truly intelligent wireless systems that will provide not only ubiquitous communication but also empower high accuracy localization and high-resolution sensing services. They will become the catalyst for this revolution by bringing about a unique new set of features and service capabilities, where localization and sensing will coexist with communication, continuously sharing the available resources in time, frequency, and space. This work concludes by highlighting foundational research challenges, as well as implications and opportunities related to privacy, security, and trust
Context-Aware Security for 6G Wireless The Role of Physical Layer Security
Sixth generation systems are expected to face new security challenges, while
opening up new frontiers towards context awareness in the wireless edge. The
workhorse behind this projected technological leap will be a whole new set of
sensing capabilities predicted for 6G devices, in addition to the ability to
achieve high precision localization. The combination of these enhanced traits
can give rise to a new breed of context-aware security protocols, following the
quality of security (QoSec) paradigm. In this framework, physical layer
security solutions emerge as competitive candidates for low complexity,
low-delay and low-footprint, adaptive, flexible and context aware security
schemes, leveraging the physical layer of the communications in genuinely
cross-layer protocols, for the first time.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2011.0732
Terahertz Communications and Sensing for 6G and Beyond: A Comprehensive View
The next-generation wireless technologies, commonly referred to as the sixth
generation (6G), are envisioned to support extreme communications capacity and
in particular disruption in the network sensing capabilities. The terahertz
(THz) band is one potential enabler for those due to the enormous unused
frequency bands and the high spatial resolution enabled by both short
wavelengths and bandwidths. Different from earlier surveys, this paper presents
a comprehensive treatment and technology survey on THz communications and
sensing in terms of the advantages, applications, propagation characterization,
channel modeling, measurement campaigns, antennas, transceiver devices,
beamforming, networking, the integration of communications and sensing, and
experimental testbeds. Starting from the motivation and use cases, we survey
the development and historical perspective of THz communications and sensing
with the anticipated 6G requirements. We explore the radio propagation, channel
modeling, and measurements for THz band. The transceiver requirements,
architectures, technological challenges, and approaches together with means to
compensate for the high propagation losses by appropriate antenna and
beamforming solutions. We survey also several system technologies required by
or beneficial for THz systems. The synergistic design of sensing and
communications is explored with depth. Practical trials, demonstrations, and
experiments are also summarized. The paper gives a holistic view of the current
state of the art and highlights the issues and challenges that are open for
further research towards 6G.Comment: 55 pages, 10 figures, 8 tables, submitted to IEEE Communications
Surveys & Tutorial
Distributed Sensing, Computing, Communication, and Control Fabric: A Unified Service-Level Architecture for 6G
With the advent of the multimodal immersive communication system, people can
interact with each other using multiple devices for sensing, communication
and/or control either onsite or remotely. As a breakthrough concept, a
distributed sensing, computing, communications, and control (DS3C) fabric is
introduced in this paper for provisioning 6G services in multi-tenant
environments in a unified manner. The DS3C fabric can be further enhanced by
natively incorporating intelligent algorithms for network automation and
managing networking, computing, and sensing resources efficiently to serve
vertical use cases with extreme and/or conflicting requirements. As such, the
paper proposes a novel end-to-end 6G system architecture with enhanced
intelligence spanning across different network, computing, and business
domains, identifies vertical use cases and presents an overview of the relevant
standardization and pre-standardization landscape
Architecture landscape
The network architecture evolution journey will carry on in the years ahead, driving a large scale adoption of 5th Generation (5G) and 5G-Advanced use cases with significantly decreased deployment and operational costs, and enabling new and innovative use-case-driven solutions towards 6th Generation (6G) with higher economic and societal values. The goal of this chapter, thus, is to present the envisioned societal impact, use cases and the End-to-End (E2E) 6G architecture. The E2E 6G architecture includes summarization of the various technical enablers as well as the system and functional views of the architecture
Beam Squint Assisted User Localization in Near-Field Integrated Sensing and Communications Systems
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been regarded as a key
technology for 6G wireless communications, in which large-scale multiple input
and multiple output (MIMO) array with higher and wider frequency bands will be
adopted. However, recent studies show that the beam squint phenomenon can not
be ignored in wideband MIMO system, which generally deteriorates the
communications performance. In this paper, we find that with the aid of
true-time-delay lines (TTDs), the range and trajectory of the beam squint in
near-field communications systems can be freely controlled, and hence it is
possible to reversely utilize the beam squint for user localization. We derive
the trajectory equation for near-field beam squint points and design a way to
control such trajectory. With the proposed design, beamforming from different
subcarriers would purposely point to different angles and different distances,
such that users from different positions would receive the maximum power at
different subcarriers. Hence, one can simply localize multiple users from the
beam squint effect in frequency domain, and thus reduce the beam sweeping
overhead as compared to the conventional time domain beam search based
approach. Furthermore, we utilize the phase difference of the maximum power
subcarriers received by the user at different frequencies in several times beam
sweeping to obtain a more accurate distance estimation result, ultimately
realizing high accuracy and low beam sweeping overhead user localization.
Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications (TWC) on 18 September 202
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