Page 46 - EE Times Europe November 2021 final

46 EE|Times EUROPE

IoT & 5G
Do We Need 6G? use by consumers, maybe within months, pos-
sibly days, and, long-term, even seconds.”
This is part of the work that is being
By Nitin Dahad addressed by the new 6G Futures virtual hub,
an initiative launched in August by the
The above headline was the title of the final talk at 5G University of Bristol and King’s College
London to develop U.K. research in 6G.
World in London in September 2021, presented by Dohler is a co-lead of the hub along with
Mischa Dohler, professor of wireless communications professor Dimitra Simeonidou, director of
the University of Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab
at King’s College London, in which he explained the and co-director of Bristol Digital Futures.

circumstances demanding 6G and what 6G might entail. Simeonidou said at the launch, “6G will be
inherently human-centric and will establish a
cyberphysical continuum by delivering real-
ohler said the next “G” is inevitable. design services for themselves. time sensory information, supporting haptics
“It’s almost like the Moore’s Law of “As a result, rather than having a very and holograms.
telecoms: always gaining some per- discrete spectrum of services, we will have “This takes us far beyond future-
Dformance improvements. If you look a continuous spectrum of very volatile ser- forecasting,” Simeonidou added. “Crucially,
at how data rate increases from generation to vices,” he added. this is about having the specialist knowl-
generation, something is always multiplied The emergence of 6G “will be like the dawn edge and expertise to transform visions into
by an order of magnitude. If you start putting of a machine-driven era,” Dohler said. “The deliverable solutions, accelerate innovation,
numbers together and you try to understand very discrete service spectrum we have in 5G and make a positive difference to society
the data density being produced by the could be augmented in 6G.” worldwide.”
systems, you see that 5G is producing some- Those changes mean transforming the pro- Dohler noted at the launch, “We will be
thing like 10 terabits per second per square cess of designing the network using artificial developing novel architectures; incorporating
kilometer. If you do the math for 6G following intelligence. “This means not humans doing federated exchange and self-synthesizing
these trends, you end up with 10 petabytes [the design], but actually artificial intelligence mechanisms; advancing the internet of skills;
per second per square kilometer.” starting to design its own network compo- and embedding blockchain, quantum, and
Dohler then questioned who is actually nents,” said Dohler. “This is very different federated AI technologies. But it’s not just pure
going to generate that data and who’s going from zero-touch networks or self-organizing tech; we’ll be working on co-creation with ver-
to use it. He doesn’t have an answer, but he networking practicums, where humans design ticals toward some truly exciting and societally
said, “My hunch is that machines will require a network and then machines configure them. impacting use cases while contributing to
quite a lot of data rate. And I think that the In this case, self-synthesizing networks are policy, alliances, and global standards.”
very discrete designing of services by humans designing themselves. So they’re self- At 5G World, Dohler also emphasized the
for humans, or by humans for machines, will evolving. My dream is really to be able to get need for global low latency. “5G provides
come to an end in 6G. Instead, machines will networks deployed from research to actual low latency, but 6G needs to continue that

Mischa Dohler at 5G World in London (Source: Nitin Dahad)

NOVEMBER 2021 | www.eetimes.eu