The commercial deployment of 5G communication networks makes the industry and academia to seriously consider the possible solutions for the next generation. Although the conventional approach indicates that 6G vision and requirements can be figured out by simply multiplying a certain amount of magnitude on top of the previous generations, we argue in this article that 1000 times price reduction from the customer's view point is the key to success. Guided by this vision, we categorize the current candidate technologies in a well organized manner and select AI-assisted intelligent communications as an example to elaborate the drive-force behind. Although it is impossible to identify every detail of 6G during the current time frame, we believe this article will help to eliminate the technical uncertainties and aggregate the efforts towards key breakthrough innovations for 6G.

Precise indoor localization is an increasingly demanding requirement for various emerging applications, like Virtual/Augmented reality and personalized advertising. Current indoor environments are equipped with pluralities of WiFi access points (APs), whose deployment is expected to be massive in the future enabling highly precise localization approaches. Though the conventional model-based localization schemes have achieved sub-meter level accuracy by fusing multiple channel state information (CSI) observations, the corresponding computational overhead is usually significant, especially in the current multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems. In order to address this issue, model-free localization techniques using deep learning frameworks have been lately proposed, where mainly classification methods were applied. In this paper, instead of classification based mechanism, we propose a logistic regression based scheme with the deep learning framework, combined with Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) assisted robust training, which achieves more robust submeter level accuracy (0.97m median distance error) in the standard laboratory environment and maintains reasonable online prediction overhead under the single WiFi AP settings.

The rapid increasing demand of wireless transmission has caused mobile broadband to continuously evolve through multiple frequency bands, massive antennas, and other multi-stream processing schemes. Together with the improved data transmission rate, the power consumption for multi-carrier transmission and processing is proportionally increasing, which contradicts with the energy efficiency requirements of 5G wireless systems. To meet this challenge, multi-carrier power amplifier (MCPA) technology, e.g., to support multiple carriers through a single power amplifier, is widely deployed in practice. With so many carriers required for 5G communication and limited number of carriers supported per MCPA, a key question to ask is how to allocate those carriers into multiple MCPAs and whether we shall dynamically adjust this allocation strategy. In this paper, we have theoretically formulated the dynamic carrier to MCPA allocation problem to jointly optimize the traditional separated baseband and radio frequency processing. On top of that, we have proposed both convex relaxation and deep learning-based algorithms. From our simulation results, the proposed algorithms achieve most of the power saving gain compared with the optimal exhaustive search-based algorithm. Furthermore, the deep learning-based approach can greatly reduce computational time, which is of vital importance in the practical deployment.

Indoor localization becomes a raising demand in our daily lives. Due to the massive deployment in the indoor environment nowadays, WiFi systems have been applied to high accurate localization recently. Although the traditional model based localization scheme can achieve sub-meter level accuracy by fusing multiple channel state information (CSI) observations, the corresponding computational overhead is significant. To address this issue, the model-free localization approach using deep learning framework has been proposed and the classification based technique is applied. In this paper, instead of using classification based mechanism, we propose to use a logistic regression based scheme under the deep learning framework, which is able to achieve sub-meter level accuracy (97.2cm medium distance error) in the standard laboratory environment and maintain reasonable online prediction overhead under the single WiFi AP settings. We hope the proposed logistic regression based scheme can shed some light on the model-free localization technique and pave the way for the practical deployment of deep learning based WiFi localization systems.

High-precision indoor localization is growing extremely quickly, especially for multi-floor scenarios. The data on existing indoor positioning schemes, mainly, come from wireless, visual, or lidar means, which are limited to a single sensor. With the massive deployment of WiFi access points and low-cost cameras, it is possible to combine the above three methods to achieve more accurate, complete, and reliable location results. However, the existing SLAM rapidly advances, so hybrid visual and wireless approaches take advantage of this, in a straightforward manner, without exploring their interactions. In this paper, a high-precision multi-floor indoor positioning method, based on vision, wireless signal characteristics, and lidar is proposed. In the joint scheme, we, first, use the positioning data output in lidar SLAM as the theoretical reference position for visual images; then, use a WiFi signal to estimate the rough area, with likelihood probability; and, finally, use the visual image to fine-tune the floor-estimation and location results. Based on the numerical results, we show that the proposed joint localization scheme can achieve 0.62 m of 3D localization accuracy, on average, and a 1.24-m MSE for two-dimensional tracking trajectories, with an estimation accuracy for the floor equal to 89.22%. Meanwhile, the localization process takes less than 0.25 s, which is of great importance for practical implementation.