The new technologies and capabilities of 6G could fulfill and expand on 5G promises

Amid a 5G rollout that has faced its fair share of challenges, it might seem somewhat premature to start looking ahead at 6G, the next generation of mobile communications. But 6G development is happening now, and it’s being pursued in earnest by both industry and academia.

Much of the future landscape for 6G was mapped out in an article published in March of this year in an article published by IEEE Communications titled “Toward 6G Networks: Use Cases and Technologies.”  The article presents the requirements, the enabling technologies and the use cases for adopting a systematic approach to overcoming the research challenges for 6G.

“6G research activities are envisioning radically new communication technologies, network architectures, and deployment models,” said Michele Zorzi,  a professor at the University of Padua in Italy, and one of the authors of the IEEE Communications article. “Although some of these solutions have already been examined in the context of 5G, they were intentionally left out of initial 5G standards developments and will not be part of early 5G commercial rollout mainly because markets are not mature enough to support them.”

The foundational difference between 5G and 6G networks, according to Zorzi, will be the increased role that intelligence will play in 6G networks. It will go beyond merely classification and prediction tasks as is the case in legacy and/or 5G systems.