Evolution Beyond 5G
We have witnessed and experienced an exponential rise in expectations from wireless technologies over the last decade. 5G shows great potential in terms of its technical capabilities and possibilities for telecom service operators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), consumers, and vertical industries. The advent of virtualization on Radio Access Network (RAN) nodes and standardized open interfaces via O-RAN bring the next level of flexibility and innovation in telecom networks. The innovations happening in the adjacent industries, such as cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), provide complementary opportunities for us to learn from the experience of 5G and define the 6G baseline.
Tech Mahindra collaborated with Intel to work extensively on the open RAN networks and continues to engage with other innovations happening in the telecom space around Edge and AI. Our vision for 6G revolves around the principles of intelligent, intent-driven, open, and simpler networks, focusing on deployment, management, and addressing the diverse use cases of today and the future. This blog outlines our vision and key imperatives for 6G. Further, it explores the key 6G technology enablers to meet the ITU-2030 vision and build a technology-agnostic underlying infrastructure compute layer that can be leveraged in 6G networks to host virtualized functions.
6G Vision and Expectations
5G networks made a significant step towards developing 1/10Gbps throughput and low-latency wireless networks. 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 International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has recommended capabilities to be part of the next-generation 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. These networks will prioritize high performance, trustworthiness, intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and sustainability. However, as an industry, we must adopt foundational principles such as openness, intent-based designs, open API, and a cloud-first approach to commercializing 6G networks.
Technological Capabilities and Foundations
The capabilities of 6G networks will advance significantly in terms of peak data rate, latency, omni-connectivity, and embedded intelligence. The enablers will leverage the recent technological advancements to deliver these network capabilities and new services/use cases. The foundational layer of the next-generation system will be based on cloud-native principles across the network function and AI workloads.
Sustainability and security are paramount 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 will evolve smoothly from existing systems based on service-based architecture and cloud-native principles. Moreover, the 5G beyond and next-generation networks will be programmable and intelligently AI-managed networks. Hence service providers should start investing in building a future-proof infrastructure layer that can be transitioned smoothly to next-generation networks with software-defined functions, enabling shorter time-to-market and providing new services without infrastructure refresh.
Hyper-Connectivity
The next-generation 6G network envisions hyper-connectivity – a multi-layered access network to provide connectivity to consumers from multiple access platforms of terrestrial networks (TN) and non-terrestrial networks (NTN), including low Earth orbit (LEO), medium Earth orbit (MEO), geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites, and high-altitude platform systems (HAPS) such as drones and balloons. The integrated TN and NTN have the potential to connect unconnected locations and pave the way for addressing new services like public safety, critical communication, disaster management, and more.
6G Ubiquitous Coverage Vision
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. Wireless service providers will offer services through their integrated TN or NTN access platforms, which will seamlessly work across indoor, outdoor, remote, maritime, and airborne locations without concerns about signal or network handovers/switches. This implies that the access systems must be deployed across TN and NTN networks, with the backend integrating into 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 a continued need for increasing spectrum availability. While existing spectrum assets will evolve for next-generation 6G systems, new spectrum frequency ranges are required to deliver immersive experiences, sensory use cases, hyper multi-layered connectivity, and the ability to handle trillions of connected devices. The research and technology development are ongoing 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 the required coverage and capacity:
- Existing Spectrum: 0.4-6Ghz, 24-52Ghz
- New Spectrum: 7-24Ghz
- Sub-Terahertz Spectrum: 92-300Ghz
Potential 6G Spectrum Bands
To deliver high throughput in the range of ~100Gbps to 1Tbps from 6G networks, it is essential to increase channel bandwidth (resource blocks) and achieve high spectral efficiency with extremely massive MIMO (spatial dimension). Hence, channel processing will be greatly increased and carried out closer to the antenna. This implies that high-processing compute resources must be placed near the antenna to improve overall system performance.
Pervasive AI Across Network and Edge
Advancements in the field of AI show great potential to mimic human intelligence, enabling the understanding of more complex functions, deriving insights, and making rational decisions—capabilities that were not possible before.
With the proliferation of connected devices and a variety of services like the metaverse, AR/VR, massive IoT, and connected ecosystems (V2X, homes, industries), the complexity of the network grows while maintaining service and network KPIs. AI will be essential for managing, operating, orchestrating, and optimizing the network. To leverage the digital enterprise use cases and drive business operational efficiency, Edge AI will become a norm, processing data at the edge to reduce latency and improve response time. To leverage digital enterprise use cases and drive business operational efficiency, Edge AI will become the norm, processing data at the edge to reduce latency and improve response time.
AI-Native Networks in Beyond 5G
Last but not least, with the rise of GenAI, intent-based orchestration, channel rendering, network/device prediction, and protocol languages will evolve.
The vast variety of AI use cases in the 6G communication system requires a pervasive AI layer across devices, networks, and the management layer to harness its power for optimizing wireless communication channels and systems to their full potential. Pervasive AI requires high-performance computing across devices, edge, and both distributed and centralized locations.
Expected Compute Requirement for 6G
Next-generation communication technologies, including 5G and beyond and 6G, are expected to have significantly higher computing requirements than their predecessors. This is driven by 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. Additionally, the need for pervasive AI and a wider spectrum to carry data will demand high-performance and multi-purpose computing systems. As real-time processing and embedded machine intelligence are implemented across the network nodes, these high-performance computing requirements will be required at centralized, distributed, and edge locations. Specialized accelerators will be needed in the compute packaging to process special functions with the required low latency, further driving the demand for advanced compute packaging.
Building and Scaling Industry-Leading Next Generation Systems and Platforms
Intel technology Across the Cloud to Edge
As networks continue to evolve—whether in transport, radio, or the core—Intel is on a journey toward advanced architectures, driving denser servers with advanced applications to support emerging technologies and networks. Intel’s hardware and software are designed to address today's business needs and pave the way for network transformation.
Developing the next generation of systems, applications, and platforms requires strong performance, optimized power and energy usage, advanced tools, and an open ecosystem. Together with our partners, Intel is committed to delivering valuable solutions and providing industry-leading scale to help you build future technologies. Intel is accelerating edge-to-cloud silicon, advancing future processor technologies such as Intel® Xeon®, contributing to the progression of open software standards, and making it easier for you to develop next-generation applications.
5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors accelerate edge deployments, drive faster time to results, and move businesses 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 leader in system integrators with extensive experience transforming networks in planning, building, and operating, is consulting service providers for journeys towards 5G+ and 6G with the Network Vision 2030 in mind.
Intel, a technology enabler with its industry-leading processors, accelerators, and software, is building technology platforms that can be leveraged today to prepare networks for future evolution toward 6G.
Tech Mahindra and Intel are jointly working to transform the current network state and 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 prepare their networks for future evolution towards 6G.
