When the head Nokia Bell Laboratories Key study talks about 'lessons learned' from 5Ghe does something rare in telecommunications: he admits that cutting-edge technology didn't work out as planned.
This frankness is still important today because Bell Laboratories President of Basic Research Peter Vetter says the success of 6G depends on getting the infrastructure right the first time. 5G not fully realized.
According to him, by 2030 5G will exhaust its possibilities. Not because some killer 5G app will appear tomorrow.which suddenly makes everyone's phones require 10 or 100 times more data than they require today. Rather, by the beginning of the decade, wireless communications will not be focused only on mobile phones more.
AI agents, autonomous cars, drones, Internet of Things nodes and sensors, sensors, sensors: all in one 6G the world will potentially need to go online. This means that in the remaining years before the expected rollout of 6G, the key game to win will be high-speed connections behind cell towers. That's forcing the industry to take a hard look at what telecoms call backhaul.high-capacity fiber optic or wireless links that carry data from cell towers to the Internet backbone.. It's the difference between your phone's “local” connection to the nearest tower and a “backbone” connection that carries millions of signals simultaneously.
But the coming crisis in transportation networks is not just about capacity. It's also about architecture. 5G was designed for a world dominated by phones downloading videos in ever higher resolutions. 6G is now becoming something completely different. This inversion—from the expected flood of 5G downlinks to the resurgence of 6G uplinks—requires a rethink of everything at a basic level, practically from the ground up.
Vetter's career spans the entire era of wireless communications, from optical interconnects in the 1990s to Alcatel (a research center pioneering fiber to the home) to their positions at Bell Laboratories and later Nokia Bell Laboratoriesculminating in 2021 in his current role at a leading industry institution.
In this conversation, which took place in November Brooklyn 6G Summit In New York, Vetter explains what's wrong with 5G, what 6G needs to do differently, and whether these innovations can arrive before telecom networks start to run out of space.
Expensive 5G Miscalculation
IEEE spectrum: Where does telecom stand today, midway between the 5G rollout and the expected 6G rollout?
Peter Vetter: Today we have enough spectrum and capacity. But in the future this will not be enough. The 5G network will run out of steam by the end of the decade. We have traffic simulators. And this is something that has been consistent from generation to generation, from 2G to 3G To 4G. Every decade the power increases approximately 10 times. So you need to be prepared for this.
And the challenge for us as researchers is how do we do this in an energy efficient way? Because energy consumption cannot increase 10 times. The cost cannot increase 10 times. millimeter wave” Lesson learned, okay millimeter waves have a short range. You need a small cage [tower] every 300 meters or so. And this doesn't solve the problem. It was too expensive to install all this. small cells.
Is this related to the issue of transit communication?
Vetter: So the backhaul is the connection between the base station and what we call the core of the network. data centersAnd servers. Ideally, you should use fiber to connect to your base station. If you have this fiber as your service provider, use it. This gives you maximum power. But very often new cell sites do not have such a fiber optic backbone, then there is an alternative: wireless backhaul.
Nokia Bell Labs has pioneered the use of glass chip architecture for telecommunications backhaul signals that enable communications between towers and telecommunications infrastructure.Nokia
Radio Made from glass. Increased frequency
What are the challenges facing wireless backhaul?
Vetter: To achieve fiber-like speeds of 100 gigabits per second, you need to move to higher frequency bands.
Higher frequency bands for backhaul network signals antennas use?
Vetter: Yes. The challenge is to design the radio interfaces and the RF system. integrated circuits (RFIC) at these frequencies. You can't truly integrate [present-day] antennas with RFIC at such high speeds.
And what happens when these signal frequencies get higher?
Vetter: So, in millimeter wavelet's say 28 gigahertz, you can still do it [the electronics and waveguides] to do this using a classic printed circuit board. But as the frequency increases, the attenuation becomes too high.
What happens when you reach, say, 100 GHz?
Vetter: [Conventional materials] no longer suitable. Therefore, we need to take a closer look at other, still inexpensive materials. We have done pioneering work at Bell Labs on radio on glass. And we use glass not because of its optical clarity, but because of its transparency in subterahertz radio range.
Is Nokia Bell Labs building these “radio on glass” backhaul systems for 100 GHz communications?
Vetter: I've used an order of magnitude. Above 100 GHz you need to look for another material. But [the wavelength range] is actually between 140 and 170 GHz, which is called D-band.
We are collaborating with our internal customers to incorporate similar concepts into a long-term program. An example is the D-band radio system that we actually integrated into our mobile business group prototype. And we tested it last year on Olympic Games in Paris.
But this, as I said, is a prototype. We need to bring the technology to maturity, from a research prototype to readying it for production. Researcher on this matter Shahriar Shahramyan. Due to this, he is well known in this field.
Why the 6G bandwidth crisis doesn't affect phones
Which applications will meet the greater bandwidth demands of 6G?
Vetter: We are installing more and more cameras and other types of sensors. What I mean is that we are entering a world where we want to create large models of the world that are synchronous copies of the physical world. So what we'll see in the future with 6G is the massive deployment of sensors that will artificial intelligence models. So more uplink capacity. That's where most of this increase will come from.
Any others?
Vetter: An example would be autonomous cars. This can also be the case in industry – e.g. digital twin harbors, and how do you do it? It could be a digital twin of a warehouse, and you ask the digital twin, “Where is my product X?” Then, thanks to the updated digital twin, the robot automatically knows where it is in the warehouse and which route it should take. Because it knows where obstacles are in real time thanks to large-scale sensing of the physical world and then interpretation using AI models.
You will have agents who will act on your behalf to deliver groceries or order food for you. driverless car. They will actively record where you are, so make sure proper privacy measures are in place. So that your agent has an understanding of your condition and can serve you in the best possible way.
How 6G networks will help detect drones, Earthquakesand tsunami
You previously described how 6G signals can not only carry data, but also enable sensing. How will it work?
Vetter: An addition now is that the network can also be used in the sensory modality. That if you turn a corner, the camera won't see you anymore. But the radio can still detect approaching people, for example at an intersection. And you can see it coming. Yes, warn the car: “There’s a pedestrian coming. Slow down.” We also have fiber recognition. And, for example, using fibers on the ocean floor and detecting the movement of waves, detecting, for example, tsunamis, and making early tsunami warning.
What are your team's findings?
Vetter: The modern use of tsunami warning buoys is several hundred kilometers from the coast. These tsunami waves move at speeds of 300 meters per second or more, so you only have 15 minutes to warn people and evacuate. If you now have a fiber-sensing network throughout the ocean that you can detect much deeper in the ocean, you can provide meaningful early warning of a tsunami.
We recently discovered that there is strong earthquake in eastern Russia. This was in July last year. And we had a fiber sensor system between Hawaii and California. And we were able to see it earthquake on the fiber. We also saw the development of a tsunami wave.
Thousands of 6G antennas and smarter waveforms
Bell Labs was a pioneer in multiple-input, multiple-output technology (PAST) antennas since the 1990s. Where multiple transmit and receive antennas can transmit multiple data streams simultaneously. What does Bell Labs do? PAST now to help solve the bandwidth issues you described?
Vetter: So, as I said earlier, you want to provide capacity to existing cell sites. And the way to MIMO can do this using a technology called simplified beamforming: If you want better coverage at a higher frequency, you need to focus your electromagnetic energy, radio energy, even more. Therefore, you will need more antennas for this.
So if you double the frequency, we'll go from 3.5 gigahertz, which is C-band in 5Gnow on 6G, 7 gigahertz. So that's about double. This means that the wavelength is half. So you can fit four times as many antenna elements in the same form factor. In this sense, physics helps us.
What's the catch?
Vetter: Where physics doesn't help us is that more antenna elements means more signal processingand energy consumption increases. So, this is where the research comes in. Can we get creative with these larger antenna arrays without increasing power consumption?
The use of AI is important in this. How can we use AI to evaluate channels, to do things like alignment, to do smart things? beamformingfor example, to find out the waveform?
We've shown that with these kinds of AI techniques, we can get 30 percent more power in the same spectrum.
And it allows many gigabits per second to be transferred to each phone or device?
Vetter: So gigabits per second are already possible in 5G. We have demonstrated this. You can imagine that this number could go up, but it really doesn't need to. The question is how much more can you support with a base station?
Articles from your site
Related articles on the Internet
