We have witnessed and experienced an exponential expectation from wireless technologies over the last decade. 5G shows great potential in terms of a wide range of technical capabilities and possibilities for telecom service operators, OEMs, consumers, and vertical industries. The advent of virtualization on the RAN nodes, along with standardized open interfaces via O-RAN brings the next level of flexibility and innovation in telecom networks.
The innovations happening in the adjacent industry of cloud and AI gives us a perfect complementing opportunity to learn from the experience of 5G and define the 6G baseline.

Tech Mahindra had collaborated with Intel to work extensively on the open RAN networks and continue to work closely on the other innovations happening in the telecom space around edge and AI. Our vision for 6G revolves around the indices of intelligent, intent driven, open, and simpler networks from the perspective of deploying and managing yet satisfying the diverse use cases of todays and future. This blog aims to position our vision and imperatives for 6G.

6G vision and expectation

5G networks made a significant step towards developing 1/10Gbps throughput and low-latency wireless network and as the world is beginning to enjoy the benefits of 5G, industry, academics and researchers have started to plan the set of requirements needed for continued evolution towards 5G advanced and next generation networks, 6G.

The ITU-R has laid out recommended capabilities to be part of the next gen. networks of IMT-2030 as 6G vision. The 6G networks will be pushing the limits of 5G networks and enhancing the use-cases while enabling a new set of services, applications, and immersive use-cases. The networks shall be built on pillars of extremely performant, trustworthy, intelligent, cognitive, flexibility and sustainability. However, we as an industry must adopt the foundations of having Openness, Intent-based, open API, cloud-first approach towards commercialization of 6G networks.

The 6G network capability will be enhanced in terms of peak data rate, latency, omni-connectivity, and embedded intelligence. The enablers will leverage the recent advancement in technology to deliver these network capabilities and new services/use-cases. The foundational layer of the next gen system will be based on cloud-native principles across the network function and AI workloads

Sustainability and security are of utmost importance with 6G societal vision goals and will be natively embedded in the 6G communication systems.

With the learnings from 5G deployments and its service-based architecture, the 6G networks are expected to be a smooth evolution of existing systems and will be based on service-based architecture and cloud-native principles. Moreover, the 5G beyond and next gen. networks are going to be programmable and intelligently AI managed networks, hence service providers shall start investing in building a future-proof infrastructure layer which can be transitioned smoothly to next-gen networks with software-defined functions enabling shorter-time to market and providing new services without infrastructure refresh.

The blog further explores the key 6G technology enablers to meet ITU-2030 vision and building a technology agnostic underlying infrastructure compute layer which can be leveraged in 6G networks to host virtualized functions.

Hyper-connectivity

Next gen 6G network is being envisioned to have a hyper-connectivity network - a multi-layered access network to provide connectivity to the consumers from multiple access platforms of terrestrial networks (TN) and non-terrestrial networks (NTN comprising of LEO/MEO/GEO satellites and HAPS – high altitude platform system like airplanes, ballons, drones). The integrated TN and NTN has the potential of connecting unconnected locations and paving the way for addressing new services like public safety, critical communication, disaster management, and more.

The integration and confluence of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks will unlock a plethora of new applications and services covering every nook of the globe. The wireless service providers provide services from their integrated TN or NTN access platforms which seamlessly working across the indoor, outdoor, remote, maritime, airborne locations without being worried about the signal or network handovers/switch. This implies that the access systems must be deployed across TN and NTN network with the backend integrating to a single subscriber management (core network) layer to achieve the hyper-connectivity vision of 6G pillars. Hence, this network evolution must be an integral part of the 6G strategy of service providers to build respective network functions and computing infrastructure across the ground, air, and space locations.

Spectrum Landscape

To realize the vision of 6G communication systems and deliver to their full potential, there is continued need for increasing spectrum availability. While existing spectrum assets will be evolved for next-gen 6G systems, new spectrum frequency ranges are required to deliver new immersive experience and sensory use-cases, hyper multi-layered connectivity, and handling trillions of connected devices. The research and technology development are on-going on new spectrum frequency ranges for component maturity, and channel modeling.

The multi-layered spectrum will be required from existing and new potential spectrum ranges for providing required coverage and capacity:

• Existing spectrum- 0.4-6Ghz, 24-52Ghz
• New spectrum (cm) – 7-24Ghz range
• Sub tera hertz- 92-300Ghz range

To deliver the high throughput in the range of ~100Gbps/1Tbps from 6G networks, it is required to increase the channel bandwidth (resource block) and high spectral efficiency with extreme massive-MIMO (spatial-dimension), hence the channel processing will be greatly increased to be processed near the antenna. This implies that high processing compute resources are placed near the antenna to improve overall system performance.

Pervasive AI across network and edge

The advancements in the field of AI, show great potential to mimic human intelligence to understand far more complex functions and derive insights and take rational decisions which was not possible before. Hence, pervasive AI is expected to be a significant feature of next gen wireless systems.

With the increasing number of connected devices along with variety of services like metaverse, AR/VR, massive IoT, connected everything (V2X, homes, industries) and complexity of network increases with maintaining the network and service KPIs, AI must be required to manage, operate, orchestrate, and optimize the network. To leverage the digital enterprise use-cases and bring business operational efficiency, edge AI is going to be a norm to process the data at the edge, reducing latency and improving response time. The AI-native wireless communication will accomplish the task of modeling of non-linear functions, radio awareness with sensing, real-time intelligent algorithm and designing new waveforms etc. to significantly improve the enhanced service quality, network performance and system capacity.

In the end but not the least, with the coming age of GenAI, it will evolve intent-based orchestration, channel rendering, network / device prediction and protocol languages.

These vast variety of AI use-cases in the 6G communication system makes a layer of AI across the devices, networks, and at management layer, called pervasive AI, to harness the power for optimizing the wireless communication channel and systems to its full potential.Pervasive AI requires high-performance compute requirements to be made available across the devices, edge, distributed and centralized locations.

Expected compute requirement for 6G.

The next gen communication technology 5G beyond and 6G is expected to have significantly higher compute requirements than its predecessors. This is due to several factors including the increased number of connected devices, hyper-connectivity access points, the massive amount of data generated by these devices and the need for real-time processing. Also, the need to have pervasive AI and a new wider spectrum to carry data will require a high-performance and multi-purpose compute system. As the real-time processing and embedded machine intelligence is implemented across the network nodes, these high-performance compute requirements will be required at centralized, distributed and edge locations. To process special functions with the required low latency, the need for specialized accelerators will also arise in overall compute packaging.

Building and Scaling Industry-Leading Next Generation Systems and Platforms.

• As networks continue to evolve, whether it is the transport, radio or the core network, Intel is on a journey for advanced architectures, driving denser servers with advanced applications to support the ever-emerging technology and network. As such, our hardware and software are designed to address the business needs of today and pave the way for network transformation.


• Developing the next generation of systems, applications and platforms requires strong performance, optimized power & energy usage, advanced tools and an open ecosystem. Together with our partners, Intel is committed to bringing forth valuable solutions and providing industry-leading scale to help you build future technologies. We are accelerating edge-to-cloud silicon, delivering on future processor technology such as Intel ® Xeon®, contributing to the advancement of several open software standards, and making it easier for you to develop next gen applications.


• 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors accelerate edge deployments, drive faster time to results, and move business forward. These new processors offer next-gen memory, greater I/O support, and built-in acceleration for deep learning and AI modeling and inference for edge servers, industrial machine vision, or video analytics applications.

Conclusion

Tech Mahindra, a global leading system integrator with extensive experience of transforming networks in planning, building, and operating is consulting service providers to take on journey towards 5G+ and 6G with network vision 2030 in mind.

Intel, being a technology enabler with its industry leading processor, accelerators, and software are building technology platforms which can be leveraged today for making networks ready for future evolution towards 6G.

Tech Mahindra and Intel are jointly working to transform the current network state to build a common future-proof infrastructure compute layer to host multi-tenant workloads from network functions to AI-workloads with sustainability and security at its core. We jointly guide and create frameworks for service providers to make their network ready for future evolution towards 6G.