Ericsson's Vision of 'The 6G World of 2030'

Ericsson has detailed their vision of ever-present intelligent communication for 6G in 2030 in a recent whitepaper. Taking a research angle on what future networks should be able to deliver and what candidate technologies should be developed to get us there, the paper starts with the pull from increasing expectations and push from technology advancements.

Four main pull drivers will emerge for the 2030 era as can be seen in the picture above: 

  1. trustworthiness of the systems that will be at the heart of society, 
  2. sustainability through the efficiency of mobile technology, 
  3. accelerated automatization and digitalization to simplify and improve our lives, 
  4. and a limitless connectivity meeting the demands for intensifying communication anywhere, anytime, and for anything.

As far as push from technological advancements beyond 5G is concerned, many new technological tools within and outside of the information and communications technology (ICT) domain will become available. These innovations will make the leap from 5G possible and enable more powerful networks in the future.

Today, hardware continues to evolve at a rapid pace and will become increasingly capable in terms of processing speed, energy performance, and size. In parallel, the emergence of new meta materials may encourage radically new approaches to (for example) antenna implementation. Smaller, simpler, low-power devices will make it possible to embed connectivity everywhere.

Cloud and virtualization technologies will continue to ensure improved cost-efficiency and adaptability, and internet-era methods (like DevOps for all layers and open-source code) are speeding up the development. The integration of AI into fully programmable networks promises to turn complexity into efficiency.

The whitepaper highlights that for the 6G networks of 2030, we should consider a broad range of promising technologies as can be seen in the picture. The study of these potential elements of 6G will be a key topic of research in the coming years. Taken together, the elements of 6G will form one seamless system, having all the needed capabilities and empowering the vision of ever-present intelligent communication. With a foundation of trustworthy systems and a highly efficient compute fabric with built-in cognition capacities, the networks of the future will deliver limitless connectivity for upcoming applications and services. This will make 6G a broad platform for innovation and the information backbone of the society.

In the first 6G Symposium, Afif Osseiran, Ericsson  and Vice-Chairman of Board at 5G-ACIA, spoke in Panel 1, Shaping Up 6G: Drivers, Use-Cases and KPI Requirements. As you can see from the Tweet, he delivered a small and powerful talk. embedded below is the portion of his talk but you can see the whole video if that is of interest.

You can also get the PDF of the whitepaper here.