Page 47 - EE Times Europe November 2021 final

EE|Times EUROPE 47

Do We Need 6G?

trajectory to provide global, rather than just
local, ultra-low latency.” This is necessary to
enable the internet of skills, which enables
virtualization of essential skills (for example,
in remote robotic surgery).
For example, in a connection between
London and Buenos Aires, the latency could
be on the order of 100 µs, opening the door
to network congestion and application delay.
Latency needs to come down significantly in
6G. Dohler said 6G will need to address AI-
enabled mobile edge-cloud applications.
In his talk, Dohler then pondered the next
“G.” So we asked him specifically about his
thoughts about what the future “G’s” might
hold. He commented, “I have to admit, I made
a prediction that 5G will be our last ‘G.’ Why?
6G could produce a data density of 10 petabytes per second per square kilometer. Because I’ve seen we have ‘software-ized’
(Slide: Mischa Dohler) the ecosystem. And I thought it would be
straightforward then to innovate in features
rather than in big blocks of whatever we do in
the ‘G’ generations. However, I have under-
estimated the amount of work it takes to
actually innovate, to get a research idea into
something you can deploy in production so
that it works with the consumers, so that’s
why I came up with this idea of self-
synthesizing networks.
“Hence, I think it will probably take us to
7G to kind of consolidate that, and therefore,
I think after 7G, 8G will probably be our last
‘G,’ but this time for real,” he concluded.
That may not happen in my lifetime, as
6G is still a few years away. But if it results
in faster innovation enabled by AI creat-
ing self-synthesizing networks, as Dohler
suggests, then I might just be wrong, and 7G
might follow soon after. We’ll see. ■
In a machine-driven era enabled by 6G, self-synthesizing networks will design themselves,
enabling much faster innovation and deployment of services. (Slide: Mischa Dohler) Nitin Dahad is editor-in-chief of Embedded.

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