Nokia is leading the 6G conversation in the US

Two years ago, Nokia unveiled its vision for 6G, identifying six key technologies that would define the 6G era of 2030. The industry has taken notice.

In the US, industry organizations, government agencies and academia have begun working closely with Nokia to make those 6G technologies a reality. Nokia has been selected to lead major 6G initiatives in the US, and our six key technologies have become major subjects at next-gen networking conferences and academic symposia. In short, Nokia has begun shaping 6G discourse in the US, and we have every intention of leading that conversation in the future.

Let’s take a closer look at these six technologies and the impact they are having on 6G research and innovation efforts in the US.

New spectrum technologies

To meet the enormous demand for bandwidth in the 6G era, we will need a 20X increase in network capacity. New spectrum and MIMO systems that utilize that spectrum effectively will be key elements enabling 6G networking in the future.

As we tap into new spectrum bands from 3 GHz all the way up to 300 GHz, we must ensure that we utilize those frequencies to their fullest. Higher-capacity MIMO technologies will be the most effective way of doing so, and Nokia’s proposals for extreme massive MIMO already have begun capturing the industry’s attention.

Nokia has already begun lab trials of distributed massive MIMO – a key step toward 6G MIMO systems – and is currently field testing the technology with AT&T, showing major momentum with the US operator community. At key industry symposia like the IEEE Wireless and Networking Conference, the Brooklyn 6G Summit, the 6G@UT kickoff conference and the Big 5G Event, Nokia has led and participated in major discussions on new enhanced MIMO techniques and other capacity-enhancing technologies like new physical layer designs, hybrid beamforming, more efficient power amplifiers, reflective intelligent services and network densification.

Nokia is playing a driving role in US efforts to unlock new spectrum bands and reinvigorate existing bands for 5G and 6G use. We are collaborating with academic researchers such as the Berkeley Wireless Research Center, NYU Wireless and the Center for Wireless Communications at UC San Diego to explore 6G use of mmWave and sub-THz bands. Nokia also chairs the mmWave Coalition and has been working closely with the aviation industry to ensure mobile networking and radio altimeters can co-exist in the C-band.

AI-native air interface

Nokia believes a dynamic AI/ML-defined native air interface will be defining characteristic of 6G networks. These interfaces could give radios the ability to learn from one another and their environments.

This notion of AI-native interface has taken hold with multiple US 6G organizations. The Next G Alliance, of which Nokia is a founding member, has set several “audacious goals,” one of which is to use AI techniques to increase the robustness, performance and efficiency of the radio interface against more diverse traffic types, ultra-dense deployment topologies and more challenging spectrum situations. As an affiliate member of the 6G@UT consortium we are also working with key academic researchers to develop AI-native air interface technologies.

Network as a sensor

In the future, 6G networks will sense their surroundings, allowing us to generate highly-realized digital versions of the physical world using frequencies up to sub-THz. Nokia believes this digital awareness could turn the network into a digital sixth sense.

The Next G Alliance has selected as another 6G audacious goal the Digital World Experience, which would transform human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions through multisensory technologies, including network sensing. Nokia is also participating in several network-as-a-sensor projects in Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS), a National Science Foundation initiative in which Nokia is a co-sponsor and co-lead of the partners working group.

Extreme connectivity

6G will be far more than a wide-area networking solution. By reproducing the latency and reliability of dedicated cables, 6G will enable a new class of subnetworks that will contain the “invisible wires” necessary to connect the most life-critical services in specialized subnetworks.

Nokia is currently working with many US organizations to make extreme connectivity a key proposal for future 6G networks. Nokia is also collaborating with commercial partners to design mission-critical subnetworks for the future. For instance, we are working with vertical farming startup AeroFarms to develop an end-to-end drone-monitoring system that will maximize the crop yields and improve efficiency in indoor agriculture.

Cognitive, automated and specialized architectures

Future 6G networks will use a very different blueprint from today’s networks. The new 6G architecture will emphasize sustainability, openness, digital inclusion, privacy and trust alongside today’s key metrics of speed, capacity and latency.

Nokia today is already a driving force in the standards bodies for defining 5G systems architectures, and we’re riding that momentum into 6G architecture planning. We have led panels on network architecture at the IEEE Wireless and Networking Conference and have made key system architecture contributions to NextG Alliance reports. These include the recently published “6G Distributed Cloud and Communications System,” which is a key step toward defining future converged communication and computing system capabilities.

Security, Trust and Privacy

While the scope of the network will expand dramatically in the 6G era so will the potential for malicious attacks. Proactively tackling the challenge of security will be key to creating resilient 6G networks, and it will require new thinking and new approaches like quantum-safe encryption. If we can’t offer rock-solid assurance that 6G networks, applications and services are secure, the world will never embrace them.

Consequently, Nokia has elevated security, privacy and trust as a paramount area of 6G research, and our peers globally have done the same. “Trust, Security and Resilience” made the NextG Alliance’s list of six audacious goals for 6G, and we have been working with partners and investing internally to make sure the topic remains at the forefront.

Nokia was recently selected as a technology provider and collaborator by the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence 5G Cybersecurity Project, and we are members of Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, where we help guide its research agenda and mentor student researchers. Nokia is also a big supporter of the CyLab’s Future Enterprise Security initiative, which is focused on researching and creating security tools for small and medium enterprises.

Finally, we are doubling down on our own cybersecurity research efforts with the launch of the Advanced Security and Research (ASTaR) lab in Dallas, Texas. The lab is the first end-to-end 5G testing lab in the US focused solely on cybersecurity, and it represents a new holistic approach to testing security solutions. ASTaR’s immediate focus is on 5G networks, but its long-term mission is to identify and research remedies for the potential threats faced by future networks.