Limitless connectivity
It’s a vision where mobile networks deliver limitless connectivity for all applications, allowing anyone and anything to connect truly anywhere and at any time.
Connectivity should not be a limiting factor to what we can do
The basic idea behind the limitless connectivity vision:
- No matter what you want to do, connectivity should not limit you.
- No matter where you are, you should have the coverage you need, the data rate you need, the latency you need, and so on.
Users and applications can focus on their tasks without any concern for lost or poor connectivity. Extreme wireless will support:
- any application and device
- any user: human, infrastructure, AI and
- end-to-end connectivity
To enable this, the network will need to:
- adapt to demands as they develop and change,
- interact with applications to understand their needs, and
- support diverse types of devices
Key areas
Network adaptability
By increasing the adaptability of our networks, we can address several key efficiencies. These might be related to the cost of deployments, energy consumption, network development and expansion, and management and operations. Increased adaptability will also help meet the dynamic needs of the applications.
Network adaptability will enable rapid network deployment and quick introduction of new services. Examples of what will be needed:
- Adapting to varying levels of integration between public and non-public networks, support for on-premises localization of telco and non-telco applications, support for low bounded latency and other quality of service (QoS) requirements, QoS differentiation for different types of network traffic, flexible resilience mechanism for enhanced survivability, and so on.
- Support for a much more heterogenous topology of the wireless access network and integration of new types of access nodes, like devices, integrated access and backhaul nodes, High-Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS), satellites, and mobile airborne cells.
- Versatile programmable transport that supports demanding 6G use cases and novel deployment options, such as a mixture of distributed radio access networks (RAN) and centralized/cloud RAN. This can be facilitated by AI-powered programmability enabled by software definition, multiservice abstraction and virtualization on heterogeneous networks, and closed-loop automation to keep transport networks flexible and manageable.
- A factor that is common to all future deployment scenarios is the requirement for a superior transport network, which is flexible, scalable, and reliable. Network architecture optimized for cloud since it is expected that future networks will be deployed in a cloud environment with clear separation of network applications from the underlying infrastructure. Future network architectures including RAN and core network should be natively designed to take advantage of such deployments. This means they should be fully service-based, utilize a common platform and IT tools, and have an enhanced functional separation enabling optimization and simplification.
- Programmable devices and networks. Previous generations of cellular networks have relied on clearly specified device behaviors controlled by network configurations. While this does provide consistent device behaviors, it also has a key limitation: New features cannot be applied to legacy devices. This limitation reduces the speed of development, could be particularly problematic for emerging enterprise use cases.
End-to-end functions
Central to this key area is high-performance connectivity for all applications and mutual awareness between applications and the network. Let’s consider the following examples:
- Leak-free infrastructure - Building infrastructure across the mobile network, Internet, and applications that do not leak user’s information. Network nodes often see user actions, for example, a DNS resolver knows a user’s browsing history, and the IMSI/SUPI are known in many mobile network nodes. Solutions building on confidential computing are being developed, there are also other technologies.
- Explicit network-application collaboration - Applications and networks are aware of each other’s needs and current conditions, which will ensure that the most suitable networking services are provided for different applications.
Network capabilities need to be available end-to-end and match the evolution of applications and internet technology to support extreme wireless.
Extreme performance
The network provides extreme performance anywhere, for existing and novel use cases when requested.
- One exciting prospect is the merging of communication and sensing. In this scenario, sensing functionality is an integrated part of the communication network, using reflections from very high-frequency radio signals in the environment to, for example, estimate the position and speed of objects and for the creation of local maps of the environment.
- Spectrum aspects - Similar to 5G, the entire spectrum range from low frequencies to very high frequencies are relevant for 6G. Extending to even higher frequencies than today - that is above 100 GHz (sometimes referred to as sub-THz, some even call it THz) - will be relevant for very specific scenarios where extremely high data rates are needed in very dense deployments. Lower frequency bands are still very important in the 6G era to provide wide-area coverage. Therefore, to access a large amount of spectrum in this range, spectrum co-existence, a future 6G radio access technology must co-exist, spectrum-wise, with the legacy 4G and 5G technologies and enable possible new licensing regimes like local licenses. Find out why sub-terahertz communication could be a key complement to 6G, unleashing extreme speeds for specific, high demanding scenarios
- Multiconnectivity - Devices are simultaneously connected across multiple sites, potentially employing multiple radio access technologies, will be even more important in the future. Distributed MIMO is in some sense an extreme case of such multiconnectivity where there is a very large number of extremely dense network nodes that, to the device, appear essentially as a large, distributed antenna array. Radio-stripes, as invented by Ericsson, is a good example of this. Distributed MIMO can provide enhanced data rates and capacity and, especially, provide a more uniform connection quality since we avoid the “cell borders”.
Embedded devices everywhere
The network will serve new types of devices that will be embedded into everything.
- “Zero-energy” devices are devices that do not need any battery replacement or even battery charging but will harvest the energy required for their functioning from ambient sources such as vibrations, heat, light, or even Radio Frequencies. Exploiting energy harvesting technologies, innovations in materials, ground-up design of energy-efficient communication will enable sustainable sensors for mass deployment.
- Network functionality supporting “trillions of devices”, for example, low-overhead signaling and data transmissions and the ability to address context handling for an extremely large number of devices in an efficient, reliable, and scalable manner. AI/ML-driven device and connectivity management will play a key role in realizing such network functionality needs.
