6G and Beyond: The Future of Wireless Communications Systems

Abstract

The next generation of wireless communication networks, or 6G, will fulfill the requirements of a fully connected world and provide ubiquitous wireless connectivity for all. Transformative solutions are expected to drive the surge for accommodating a rapidly growing number of intelligent devices and services. Major technological breakthroughs to achieve connectivity goals within 6G include: (i) a network operating at the THz band with much wider spectrum resources, (ii) intelligent communication environments that enable a wireless propagation environment with active signal transmission and reception, (iii) pervasive artificial intelligence, (iv) large-scale network automation, (v) an all-spectrum reconfigurable front-end for dynamic spectrum access, (vi) ambient backscatter communications for energy savings, (vii) the Internet of Space Things enabled by CubeSats and UAVs, and (viii) cell-free massive MIMO communication networks. In this roadmap paper, use cases for these enabling techniques as well as recent advancements on related topics are highlighted, and open problems with possible solutions are discussed, followed by a development timeline outlining the worldwide efforts in the realization of 6G. Going beyond 6G, promising early-stage technologies such as the Internet of NanoThings, the Internet of BioNanoThings, and quantum communications, which are expected to have a far-reaching impact on wireless communications, have also been discussed at length in this paper.

Sociological modeling of smart city with the implementation of UN sustainable development goals

“…Many cities have already transformed into “smart” digital/virtual hubs in which the most of services are provided online with limitations of citizen contacts (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2016 ; McClellan et al 2017 ; Smart City Index 2020 ; Smart Cities World City Profiles 2020 ). Smart city approaches have been elaborated to face health care challenges (Islam et al 2015 ; Baker et al 2017 ; Marjani et al 2017 ; Cook et al 2018 ; Allen et al 2019 ; Akyildiz et al 2020 ) and to resist pandemic outbreak expansion with accents on data (Costa and Peixoto 2020 ; Webb and Toh 2020 ), social distancing (Cecilia et al 2020 ; Nguyen et al 2020a , b ), Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Chamola et al 2020 ; Tropea and De Rango 2020 ), smart health care devices (Jaiswal et al 2020 ), and waste management (Onoda 2020 ). Data governance and digital services ensure city life safe without an economy lockout and unemployment.…”

6G Enabled Industrial Internet of Everything: Towards a Theoretical Framework

“…6G communication architecture should enable IIoE devices, sensors, machines to not only connect to the Internet but also to communicate with one another autonomously. The current literature describes several 6G and IoT/IoE architectures [43], [44] (p. 134010). In contrast to the 3 and 4-layers architectures nevertheless, there is no proposed global 6G and IIoE standard architecture yet and drawing from the authors' extensive experience in 5G-enabled IoT/IoE architecture design as well as from the literature review of relevant research work, we believe multiple layers are essential to capture the complexity of the 6GIIoE system architecture.…”

“…Hence, we have proposed and discussed below a simplified 5-layer 6GIIoE modular architecture as shown in The operating system (OS) is the virtual application platform that aggregates open innovations for various industrial applications and people (e.g., Apps can be developed using intelligence from the Digital Edge-Cloud on which it operates) and should serve as the 'operations center' for the public services domain. The Digital Edge-Cloud (DEC) [44] denotes the edge-cloud platform (with embedded hardware and software) that aggregates intelligence spanning multiple use cases, and more widely across IIoE applications, namely CIIW etc. that could benefit from composite information.…”

“…Most industries are exploring the deployment of new types of connectivity such as 5G or the emerging 6G to exploit high-value use cases. Hence, it is important to create backward compatible and an efficient 6GIIoE architecture that can accommodate software-defined radio (SDR)-a radio communication [44] (p. 134011) method where most signal processing is done using software. IIoE gateways leveraging SDR or 6G can implement and decode different protocols to save infrastructure cost and complexity.…”

Role of Wireless Communication in Healthcare System to Cater Disaster Situations Under 6G Vision

“…(Van Huynh et al, 2018). RIS is a passive or semi-passive surface, containing antenna elements to provide an intelligent communication environment, along with improved coverage and capacity via customizing radio signals intelligently before reflection (Akyildiz et al, 2020). Apart from cryptography-based security, 6G will provide a new solution to the security paradigm with the inclusion of PLS and quantum cryptography.…”