Mobile phone technology has changed the way people understand and interact with the world and with each other. It is difficult to imagine a technology that has shaped life in the 21st century more strongly.
The latest technology – the fifth generation of mobile standards or 5G – is currently being applied in selected locations around the world. And that raises an obvious question. Which factors will stimulate the development of the sixth generation mobile technology? How will 6G differ from 5G, and what kind of interactions and activities will make it possible that 5G is not possible?
Today we get all kinds of answers, thanks to the work of Razvan-Andrei Stoica and Giuseppe Abreu at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany. These boys have identified the limitations of 5G and the factors that they believe will stimulate the development of 6G. Their conclusion is that artificial intelligence will be the main driver of mobile technology and that 6G will be the driving force behind a whole new generation of applications for machine intelligence.
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First some background information. According to all criteria, 5G is a significant advance on the previous 4G standards. The first 5G networks already offer download speeds of up to 600 megabits per second and can be considerably faster. In contrast, 4G generally works at a maximum of 28 Mbit / s – and most mobile phone users will experience from time to time that the speed decreases to zero for reasons that are not always clear.
5G is clearly better in this regard and could even replace many fixed connections.
But the most important benefits go beyond these key figures. For example, 5G base stations are designed to handle up to a million connections, compared to the 4,000 that 4G base stations can handle. That should make a difference for communication at large gatherings such as sporting events, demonstrations, etc., and it could make all kinds of applications for the internet of things possible.
Then there is latency – the time it takes for signals to travel across the network. 5G is designed to have a latency of just a single millisecond, compared to 50 milliseconds or more at 4G. Every gamer will tell you how important that is, because it makes the remote control of game characters more responsive. But several telecom operators have demonstrated how the same advantage makes it possible to control drones more precisely and even to perform telephone surgery via a mobile connection.
All of this should be possible with lower power requirements to start up, and current claims suggest that 5G devices should have 10 times the battery life of 4G devices.
So how can 6G do that better? 6G of course offers even higher download speeds – the current idea is that they can access 1 terabit per second.
But what kind of transformative improvements could it offer? The answer, according to Stoica and Abreu, is that it enables rapidly changing collaborations on a large scale between intelligent agents who solve complex challenges directly and negotiate solutions to complex problems.
Take the problem of coordinating self-driving vehicles through a large city. That is a major challenge, as around 2.7 million vehicles drive into a city like New York every day.
The self-driving vehicles of the future must be aware of their location, their environment and how it is changing, and of other road users such as cyclists, pedestrians and other self-driving vehicles. They must negotiate intersections and optimize their route in a way that minimizes travel times.
That is an important computational challenge. For example, cars must quickly create on-the-fly networks when they approach a certain intersection – and then leave them almost immediately. At the same time, they will be part of wider networks that calculate routes and travel times, and so on. “Interactions will therefore be needed in large quantities to solve large distributed problems where huge connectivity, large data volumes and ultra low latency that go beyond those offered by 5G networks will be essential,” said Stoica and Abreu.
This is of course just an example of the type of collaboration that 6G makes possible. Stoica and Abreu present a wide range of other distributed challenges that can be solved with this kind of approach.
These will be based on real-time generation and collaborative processing of large amounts of data. An obvious application is network optimization, but others include monitoring and planning of the financial market, healthcare optimization, and “nowcasting” – that is, the ability to predict events and respond when they occur – on a previously unimaginable scale.
Artificially intelligent agents are clearly intended to play an important role in our future. “To harness the true power of such agents, collaborative AI is the key,” say Stoica and Abreu. “And due to the nature of the mobile society of the 21st century, it is clear that this collaboration can only be achieved through wireless communication.”
That is an interesting vision of the future. Much remains to be negotiated and horses traded before a set of 6G standards can even be outlined, let alone completed. But if Stoica and Abreu are right, artificial intelligence will be the driving force that forms the communication networks of the future.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1904.03413: 6G: the wireless communication network for collaborative and AI applications
