Communications in the 6G Era

With deployment of 5G systems in full swing, research focus towards 6G mobile cellular systems has started. It is essential to establish a vision of future communications to provide guidance for the research. In this paper, we attempt to paint a broad picture of communication needs and technologies in the time frame of 6G. The future of connectivity is in the creation of digital-twin world that is a true representation of the physical and biological worlds at every spatial and time instant and unifying our experience across these physical, biological and digital worlds. The new themes that are likely to emerge such as (i) new man-machine interfaces created by a collection of multiple local devices acting in unison (ii) ubiquitous universal computing distributed among multiple local devices and the cloud (iii) multi-sensory data fusion to create the multi-verse maps and new mixed-reality experiences and (iv) precision sensing and actuation to control the physical world, will shape the 6G system requirements and technologies.