17 September 2021

White Paper on RF Enabling 6G published

White Paper on RF Enabling 6G – Opportunities and Challenges from Technology to Spectrum has been published. The twelfth and final 6G White Paper in 6G Flagship’s 2020 edition covers key topic areas of RF, radio transceiver implementation, radio signal propagation, semiconductor technologies and integrated circuits, antennas, packaging, optical communications, and RF testing.

The expert group leader Prof. Aarno Pärssinen took an active role in defining the contents and invited leading experts on radio engineering to contribute to the white paper. As a result, the international expert group with 34 participants presented various complementary expertise dimensions of radio technology.

“The group’s expertise ensured a holistic end-to-end view over the radio topics, which need to be carefully explored before the 6G networks are in operation in the 2030 time-frame,” Pärssinen says.
Many visions of 6G and the evolution of data rates in wireless systems in general are directing their vectors toward Tbps communications during the next ten years. This target, with the important goal of sustainable development in the future world, will inevitably lead to many questions within the RF community about whether this will be feasible at all, and how.

It is evident that 6G will not only be extremely high-speed communications. For example, the existing wireless infrastructure and new solutions in ultra-low power communications will also live and evolve, further enriching the fabric of wireless systems serving an even wider spread of applications.

6G is also expected to merge communications and sensing in a new way, and the wide bandwidth needed for data will also benefit many high-precision sensing applications. Multi-use, scalability, and energy efficiency will be of the utmost importance, and the tradeoffs will be neither straightforward nor easy to implement, or even understand, without a deep dive into key technologies. These are evolving mostly from the well-established solutions in the market, but at the same time, the need for something completely new is evident. The gap between radio and optical communications is also narrowing, potentially answering some of the concerns.

The white paper not only discusses the opportunities but also the serious challenges that are foreseeable in the technology community. These may slow down, or in the worst case even block, some of the development paths. How we cope with such threats and use the existing opportunities in the engineering process from early research to final products in the current landscape is one of the key questions that will be asked by the RF community. At the end of the white paper, a list of refined questions is shared. These are not for the RF community alone, but for experts working in various disciplines and stakeholders that are together building the future of 6G enabled by radio technologies.