Advancing Towards the Next Decade: 6G Waves Magazine’s Latest Edition by University of Oulu’s 6G Flagship
University of Oulu’s 6G Flagship has released the 6th edition of its publication, the 6G Waves Magazine. The magazine highlights the achievements and goals of the 6G Flagship programme and offers insights into where we are now and where we can be in the next ten years.
According to the director of 6G Flagship, Professor Matti Latva-aho, “6G is on the way as witnessed by over thirty new EU-funded 6G projects, numerous national projects, and programmes all over the world started recently.” The International Telecommunication Union’s Working Party (ITU-R WP 5D) will finalise the preparatory work on 6G directions in June, and the World Radio Conference (WRC-23) will launch discussions on 6G spectrum matters towards the year-end.
The 6G Flagship programme has proposed several new ideas for improving the capabilities of 6G compared to 5G. The variety of highly different use cases calls for a certain level of flexibility and customisation of RAN solutions for efficient deployments, with O-RAN being one viable way to make such networks real. 6G Metaverse-type applications are pushing researchers to explore the limits of realisable communication systems, including THz radios, metamaterials, and semantic communications.
The key driver for 6G should be democratising digital services, according to Latva-aho. Digital services will be deployed immersively during the 6G era and play a vital role in improving the efficiency of industrial processes as well as many functions of society. This sets enormous challenges for arranging sufficient and trustworthy coverage and services no matter where the users are. Therefore, coverage improvement is even more important than Tbps connectivity.
The next few months will be exciting times on the road towards 6G. The 6G community must be optimistic and open-minded to set the direction of 6G that will benefit the whole world and different needs for the future.
As Matti Latva-aho says in his foreword, “Let’s be optimistic and open-minded so that our community will set the direction of 6G benefiting the whole world and different needs for the future.”
Read your copy of 6G Waves and stay tuned for more updates on the progress towards 6G.