The future digital society, within the scope of increasing automation, comprises more and more connected devices (IoT), including sensors, vehicles, aerial drones, data, etc. The increasing number of sensors per vehicle requires higher speed communications and lower latencies. Society and organizations demand that new services be included in 6G, including the following:
- Augmented reality and extended reality;
- Applications infused with artificial intelligence;
- Wireless brain-computer interactions;
- holographic services;
- The integration of communications with location, mapping and remote control;
- Emerging eHealth applications;
- Enhanced autonomous vehicles;
- More efficient support for IoT, namely smart cities and smart homes, supporting an extremely high number of low energy consumption devices;
- Flying vehicle support and increased mobility speed.
Furthermore, 6G aims to have greater energy efficiency and more efficient energy capture strategies so that the autonomy of users' equipment can be increased despite their demanding applications.
These new services and capabilities to be supported by 6G continue to require more efficient networks, such as increased data rate, lower latency, more efficient spectral efficiency, greater energy efficiency and improved network capacity. Some of the anticipated requirements for 6G include the following:
- Peak data rate in static environment of at least 1 Tbps (100 times higher than 5G);
- 1 Gbps mobile data rate (10 times higher than 5G);
- Energy efficiency 10 to 100 times better than 5G;
- Spectral efficiency 5 to 10 times better than 5G.
While 5G requirements are achieved based on mm-wave and m-MIMO, 6G must incorporate new concepts such as passive antennas, namely reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). To obtain potential gains (coverage, interference cancellation, secrecy, spectral efficiency, etc.), there is a need to estimate channel characteristics, which is difficult to achieve with passive elements. Recently, active antennas, such as large intelligent antenna systems (LIS), also called ultramassive MIMO (UL-MIMO) or extremely large antenna arrays (ELAA), have been employed to achieve such desired gains; however, complexity also increases with the use of these processes. In terms of frequency bands, 6G is revolutionary, as it includes visible light communications (VLC) and terahertz bands (100 GHz – 10 THz), enabling data rates in the hundreds of Gbps. VLC is a mature communications technique, suitable for short-range coverage, although susceptible to interference such as from the sun.
speakers
speakers
Mario Marques da Silva
University Professor and Director of the Department of Engineering and Computer Science, as well as researcher at the Telecommunications Institute, in Lisbon, Portugal.
He is also a Cisco certified instructor for the CCNA course, author of five books from the North American publisher CRC Press.
And also, author of several dozen articles in international magazines and conferences, member of the IEEE, and reviewer for several scientific magazines and international conferences of the IEEE. Finally, he has served on the organizing committee of relevant EURASIP and IEEE conferences.
Inês Almeida
Professor at the Department of Engineering and Computer Science at the Autonomous University of Lisbon.
