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tags commonly used in retail sales and logistics can only be read from a short distance. Equipped with special sensors and a larger range, however, they could be used to monitor food quality. The IoT boost will also change how connected radio sensors are powered, which presents a huge challenge for their large-scale deployment. The sheer quantity of these sensors as well as the degree of miniaturisation makes it unfeasible to exchange the power cells. Since many applications are conceived for long-term deployment over many years, the sensors must be able to provide their own power. Zero energy devices and energy harvesting are two buzzwords here. Today’s RFID sensors work with electromagnetic energy harvested directly from a nearby reader or scanner. But 6G sensors will have to make do without this convenience and obtain power from suitable local sources such as heat, light or motion. As with many other 6G topics, research in this area is still in its infancy.


A NETWORK OF RADIO NETWORKS 6G will be not only an inexhaustible basis for the internet of things, but also a new kind of internet. With 6G, fixed, mobile terrestrial and non- terrestrial networks will integrate seamlessly into a constantly changing heterogeneous network landscape (organic network). Commercial, private and public subnetworks of all sizes will coexist, ranging from the macrocells that exist today and provide coverage over an entire square kilometre – to attocells and zeptocells with coverage for a single room or vehicle. Openness, virtualisation and disaggregation are required to tailor network functionality to the customer application and to spark innovation of new services The disaggregated network’s function blocks must provide multivendor support in compliance with the standard. Rohde & Schwarz is an active member of the O-RAN alliance, which is already laying the foundations for this.


THE RACE IS UNDERWAY


Initial discussions of 6G only began a few years ago, but since then a lot has happened in industry, research institutes and the political world. Research initiatives have been set up around the world, financial support has been granted


and alliances have been forged. Politicians understand that competitiveness – and the economic prosperity of their countries – may rest on equal participation in the 6G system while avoiding dependency. In the spring of 2021, Japan and the USA agreed to invest $4.5 billion in 6G research. South Korea has an ambitious plan to invest some $195 million over the next four years and will be ready for preliminary field tests by 2026.


Europe has launched its flagship 6G project,


Hexa-X, with organisations from nine different countries. Rohde & Schwarz is actively working with relevant research organisations worldwide. Separately, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is providing €700 million in funding until 2025. In the short term, €250 million will go to four national research hubs where Rohde & Schwarz is involved as a partner or project coordinator.


And then there is China. Of course, China has no intention of giving up its strong 5G position simply because the next generation of technology has arrived. China’s Ministry of Science and Technology is working with other ministries and government agencies to coordinate national resources and get 6G ready for deployment as quickly as possible. Rohde & Schwarz has been a close partner to industry as well as a leading supplier of T&M equipment since the very beginning of the digital mobile communications era. The company’s products and expertise are already in use today in various 6G research and development projects, and the company is committed to also provide the measuring equipment needed for 6G large scale rollout.


6G RESEARCH AREAS


There is a need for further research and development in the following areas:


FREQUENCIES: 5G is using the millimetre wave range (> 20 GHz) for individual communications for the first time. FR2 (7.125-24 GHz) is the most promising frequency for mass 6G rollout. But 6G will also use higher frequencies: up to 100 GHz and higher for sensing and 90-170 GHz for backhaul. Even the terahertz range (300 GHz to 3 THz) is being explored.


Fig 4: 6G is set to meld the physical world (environment, machines), the digital world (data, virtual environments) and the human world in a symbiotic way, as shown here in the vison presented by the European Hex-X initiative.


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ANTENNAS: at such high frequencies which correspond to short wavelengths, the antennas have dimensions in the millimetre range. Base stations will combine up to 60 000 of these antennas into arrays to supply simultaneous coverage for hundreds of mobile devices via individual directional beams. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are being developed today. They could be deployed on building walls, for example, to improve the performance of wireless communications in terms of coverage and efficiency.


ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI): AI will be a major hallmark of 6G. It bears the potential to dynamically adjust the network to cope with varying environment and customer demand. AI will be used in technical components as well as in network planning and monitoring. The ultimate goal is to achieve a zero-touch (self-optimising) network in terms of cost, energy, spectral and operational efficiency.


VIRTUALISATION: all of the main network components should be defined and addressable via standardised abstract functions. This ensures that products from different manufacturers can be combined while leaving room for specific technical configurations.


SELF-POWERED SENSORS: quantity wise, myriads of miniature sensors will form the largest share of the internet of things. They will need to operate maintenance-free for prolonged periods of time while obtaining power through energy harvesting.


INTEGRATED RADIO, SENSOR AND COMPUTER NETWORK: 6G will be much more than just a radio network. Integrated location and sensing functions will allow the position of network users to be pinpointed down to the centimetre while checking his vital functions. The network’s processing power will also be massively distributed and harnessed either close to the network user or in remote data centres depending on requirements (edge, fog and cloud computing).


DATA INTEGRITY: 6G networks will form the backbone of business and industry – even more than 5G. Countless business processes and services will be based on these networks. Data security is therefore critical. Users must be correctly authenticated with absolute reliability. Every connection will require encryption. Block chain technology is being considered as a way to avoid dependence on central instances in order to ensure data integrity.


ENERGY EFFICIENCY: energy demands inevitably also rise when data communications grow exponentially. The energy consumed per bit transmitted needs to fall in order to keep energy efficiency in check.


Rohde & Schwarz www.rohde-schwarz.com February 2024 Instrumentation Monthly


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