Technology Report - 6G Update

Confidentiality Class External Confidentiality Label Document Type Page
Ericsson Internal Report 1 (14)
Technology Report - 6G update

Prepared By (Subject Responsible) Approved By (Document Responsible) Checked
EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

Document Number Revision Date Reference
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Contributors: Patrik Persson, Erik Dahlman, Stefan Parkvall, Gustav WIkström, Håkan Björkegren, Peter Öhlén, Dinand Roeland,
Joacim Halén, Gunnar Mildh, Göran Rune, Jari Arkko, Bengt Sahlin, Kristina Gold
Table of Contents
1 Introduction.................................................................................................................................
2 Industry momentum..................................................................................................................
3 Use case evolution......................................................................................................................
4 Evolution towards 6G capabilities..........................................................................................
5 The 6G platform..........................................................................................................................
5.1 Limitless connectivity..........................................................................................................
5.2 Cognitive Networks...........................................................................................................
5.3 Trustworthy systems........................................................................................................
5.4 Network compute fabric..................................................................................................
6 Competitor landscape.............................................................................................................
7 Ericsson 6G strategy................................................................................................................
1 Introduction
5G systems are currently being deployed at a rapid pace, providing high-speed low-latency
connectivity for a wide range of services. Over the last three decades, cellular connectivity
has undergone a remarkable evolution, going from voice-only systems to mobile data and
IoT connectivity, serving not only smartphones but also facilitating new usage scenarios
such as factory production, logistics, and smart cities. A similar evolution has taken place in
other areas. For example, compute platforms have evolved from monolithic software run on


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mainframe computers via personal workstations into today’s micro-service-based cloud

computing. The evolution of compute power has enabled big data analytics and machine
learning. Clearly, the evolution in these areas will continue.
Given the recent introduction of 5G and associated services, it is timely to discuss compute
and communication platforms in the 2030 timeframe, sometimes also referred to as 6G.
Several research projects and studies have been launched across the world. It is important
to understand that the current 5G systems will continue to evolve over the decade.
2 Industry momentum
The work on 6G is currently in an early research phase. Focus is on explorative research on
technology components, use cases, drivers for future radio and network. External research
projects have started in EU, Korea, China, US and Japan. Ericsson is also meeting with
operators and vendors to discuss use cases, drivers, research areas and expected timeline.
At this point in time, it is not clear what 6G or the 6G system will be. Further, it is not clear if
and how it will be standardized. 6G could be a new radio access technology (like 5G NR),
RAN and CN or it could be an evolution of existing 5G technologies.
Most players in the industry assume 6G will be commercialized by 2030, except for South
Korea who assumes first deployments in 2028. The standardization is expected to follow
the normal ITU-R initiative process, with 3GPP submitting the main technology proposals.
The initial work on 6G in 3GPP could start as early as 2024/5 with a study item, and with
first 6G specifications being roughly ready during 2028. Initial thinking and bi-lateral
discussions on what should be included in 6G needs to happen before 3GPP work starts, i.e.
between now and 2024. Ericsson is not in a hurry from a commercial perspective, but we
have the ambition to be the leader in 6G and to shape the industry.


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The Ericsson preferred timeline is (see Figure 1):

 Large scale commercial service in 2030
 Implementable specifications in 2028
 3GPP standardization 2025-2028
 Ericsson 6G trials: 2024 – 2028
 Pre-standardization industry alignment on 6G systemization: 2023 – 2025
 Pre-standardization industry alignment on 6G technology components: 2020 - 2025
 Research on technology components: until 2025
Figure 1: Ericsson preferred 6G timeline and activities.
Ericsson is active in the external 6G research discussions to influence the industry in a

direction which is good for society, industries, Ericsson and Ericsson’s customers. The
number of companies active in standards development organizations (SDOs) is constantly
increasing, and includes niche players, new entrants, operators, cloud providers and device
vendors, meaning that Ericsson will have very small formal power in the SDOs. Hence, it is
critical to use Ericsson informal powers from knowledge on how to build earlier generation
networks, knowledge from early research and collaboration with key industry players.
The society of 2030 is expected to have transformed around increasingly advanced

technologies, where 5G plays a key role and the future networks act as the communication
and information backbone, allowing anything to communicate anywhere and anytime.
Ericsson have identified four drivers that are important for the society 2030:
 Application demands: There is already today a very strong increase in highly

demanding applications such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality as well as remote
control of sensitive operations. Going towards 2030, this evolution can be expected to
continue with even higher networks performance demands.
 Trustworthiness: Society must be able to rely completely on networks delivering critical
services while being able to ensure the integrity of the information. People as well as
industries must be able to rely on verified data and identities even as they enjoy full
privacy.
 Sustainable world: Wireless communication already plays an important sustainability
role. It is a clear potential to further accelerate its contribution in enabling increased
efficiency in the use of resources and support of new ways of living.


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 Simplified life: With artificial intelligence (AI), it is possible to optimize and simplify
many processes and improve operations by reducing the need for human participation
and supervision. A dramatic increase in the use of AI is expected to further optimize
society and simplify lives. AI needs to be designed for the highest security and
explainability.
All of the above drivers should be seen in a cost perspective. Ericsson should offer solutions
at an affordable cost.
Beyond 5G, many new technological tools within and outside of the information and
communications technology (ICT) domain will become available. Innovations such as AI,
cloud, edge, IoT, XR/VR, new computing and memory technologies, smart materials, will
make the leap from 5G possible and enable more powerful networks in the future, see
Figure 2.
Figure 2: Examples of technology forces and tools essential for 6G innovation.
Hardware continues to evolve at a rapid pace and will become increasingly capable in terms
of processing speed, energy performance, and size. Use of COTS HW and accelerators is
gaining traction and can be used to enable efficiency implementation. In parallel, the
emergence of new meta materials may encourage new approaches to antenna
implementations. Smaller, simpler, low-power devices will make it possible to embed
connectivity everywhere.
Cloud and virtualization technologies will continue to ensure improved cost-efficiency and
adaptability, and internet-era methods, like DevOps and open-source code, are speeding up
the development. The integration of AI into fully programmable networks promises to turn
complexity into efficiency.


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3 Use case evolution

Ericsson research 2030 vision is to make it
possible to move in a cyber-physical continuum.
This will be made possible by connecting digital
and physical worlds. See Figure 3. The vision is
captured in the following identified use cases:
 Connected intelligent machines –

The network provides the means to facilitate
communication between intelligent
machines e.g. by leveraging the networks
knowledge of the physical and digital world.
 Internet of senses - Immersive physical
experience of the world away from you
through interaction in the digital world.
 Digitalized & programmable physical Figure 3: Illustrating the cyber-physical
world - The physical and the digital worlds continuum.
are synchronized with sensor/actuator data.
 Connected sustainable world - Using networks to enable a sustainable transformation.
These use cases indicate new services where 6G need to be enabled.
A continuous evolution of the three service areas of 5G is foreseen to continue over 5G

Advanced and expand into 6G. This is to meet additional requirements coming from new
applications, but also to widen the scope of ICT into new markets, such as society critical,
and to meet automation and digitalization needs in sectors beyond industries and transport.
The evolving service areas are (see Figure 4):
eMBB à eMBB+ à Immersive communication, providing intense human, machine, and

digital interaction of high rate at real time with high capacity. An example use case in this
direction is Massive multisensory merged reality – experiencing cyber-physical objects with
all senses placed in reality, blurring the line between physical and digital worlds in
immersive gaming/sports/meetings.
cMTC à cMTC+ à Critical services, meeting sensitive needs in society and industry with
service assurance at real time. Examples of use cases in this domain are:
 Precision healthcare - Connecting a body area network of in-body and on-body devices
through a gateway, enabling a digital body double for continuous medical analysis
 Connected emergency – where an integrated network of sensors, robots, and connected
persons form a highly resilient and digitalized alarm response system
mMTC à mMTC+ à Pervasive IoT, massive machine interaction building digital twins for
any scenario, also considering service coverage and service assurance. In this direction there
are use cases such as:


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 Interactive 4D map – real-time digital twins of cities where activity can be planned and
the past analyzed by online agents
 Physical internet of tags - tiny localizable identifier tags attached to objects for wide-
area asset tracking of anything
Figure 4: Service area evolution towards 6G.
Adding to this expanding scope of 5G services are change vectors within and outside of the
ICT industry, notably:
 an integration of communication and compute resources together with AI functionality

into a continuous intelligent network compute fabric, where processing and intelligence
can be offered anywhere
 new capabilities to localize, sense, and map the physical world
 an emphasis on reaching everywhere and bridging the gaps to digitalize the world
Adding a trustworthy and secure general-purpose network to the change vectors also opens
up for new 6G service areas such as:
 Compute services, enabling flexible application hosting, AI, storage and confidential
compute. An example of this is Collaborative AI partner - autonomous systems/cobots
assist and collaborate with other cobots/human to solve joint tasks, reading intent and
adapting. This can be seen as the next step in the evolution of industrial IoT.
 Exposure services, platforms for sharing auxiliary data such as sensor data, localization
and application enablers. In this direction a new use case is Interacting and navigating
robots - enabling connected autonomous vehicles to use external sensors, share sensor
data and trajectories and build up a network sensor fabric for safe transports. This use
case can also be seen as an evolution of vehicle-to-anything (V2X).
 Global data, providing basic data connectivity (MBB and IoT) everywhere is an
important sustainability enabler, both for socio-economical aspects such as digital
inclusion, and for environmental aspects. Two examples of this area are E-health for all
– cost-effective video doctor’s consultations remotely to everyone and Earth monitor –
harvesting sensor data and energy from environment anywhere as the basis for global
warning and surveillance systems.


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4 Evolution towards 6G capabilities

Traditional capabilities such as data rate, latency, reliability and capacity will remain
important. However, simply scaling a quantity such as peak data rate has little, if any,
bearing on reality. As a simple example, already the 5G peak data rate of 25 Gbit/s is not
likely to be used in practice. Hence, increasing peak rate to 1 Tbit/s, as is sometimes
proposed, is of little relevance. Focus should instead be on increasing the data rates
achievable for fundamental 6G use cases.
The situation is similar for latency where 5G has greatly contributed to ultra-reliable low-
latency communication (URLLC). Instead of focusing on further reducing the latency
significantly below 1ms, it is more important to focus on reducing variations in delay, i.e.
reducing the delay jitter. For most use cases a latency of a few milliseconds is sufficient, as
long as the jitter is low.
Traffic capacity and coverage remain important and tools to improve in these areas should
remain in focus. Note that it is the area capacity that is relevant, not the per-cell capacity,
and simplifications related to site deployment are highly relevant. Network energy efficiency
is clearly also highly relevant given the sustainability discussion in the introduction.
The outer ring in Figure 5 covers capabilities that has typically not been highlighted in
previous systems or are new to 6G. They capture the fact that 6G is more than cellular
access. These capabilities are equally important as the traditional ones and should receive
the attention they deserve.
Security Service
and privacy availability
Data rates
Network
Extreme Latency energy Service
devices efficiency versatility
Total cost of
ownership
Positioning Coverage
Traffic
Hosting
capacity
Sensing distributed
applications
Deployment
flexibility
Figure 5: Example of future 6G system capabilities.



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Security and privacy cover aspects such as end-to-end security assurance, secure identities,
and threat detection with the associated response. Confidential computing to ensure data is
not leaking between different users/applications is another aspect in this category.
Service availability refers to resilient and robust performance despite natural disasters,
infrastructure perturbations, and malicious attacks. Note that this is wider than the
reliability aspect part of URLLC.
Service versatility is the set of capabilities required to automate deployment and operation
of a wide range of services with quite different characteristics and requirements. Ideally,
this is done through zero-touch management, taking advantage of AI to minimize need of
human intervention. Scalability, where the number of services and networks managed can
increase without a significant increase in cost is another aspect, as is application
onboarding and fast deployment of new services.
Hosting distributed applications – or at least the critical tasks thereof – requires compute
and storage capabilities embedded into the network. Such global, pervasive compute access
will facilitate true end-to-end performance guarantees for applications potentially
federated across ecosystem partners. Applications will be conveniently exposed to
developers together with a rich set of distributed tools and services.
Deployment flexibility is the set of capabilities required to handle dynamic network

deployment, e.g. a temporary network for a special event, and the spectrum flexibility
required for future cellular systems.
Sensing is the collection of requirements related to using the cellular network for sensing
purposes in addition to communication, e.g. how the base stations can form a radar-like
network to assist modelling the surroundings. Sensing can also cover other quantities such
as rain detection from pathloss measurements as input to improved weather forecasts.
Extreme devices refer to devices beyond the current smartphone, primarily IoT devices.
Support for a very large number of devices, “zero-energy” devices not requiring battery
charging or replacement, and “zero-waste” devices with integrated life-cycle support are
some examples in this category.
Finally, total cost of ownership must be kept in mind. At the early research stage where 6G
currently is, a relatively wide set of technologies can, and should, be studied, but eventually
only technologies providing benefits surpassing their cost will happen. Automation can also
help reducing cost by replacing manual work.
5 The 6G platform
5.1 Limitless connectivity
A wide range of technologies need to be investigated to fulfill the limitless connectivity

vision. A few examples are described below.


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The network architecture should be based on a common cloud architecture and readily
available IT tools. The network functions in the RAN and CN should be fully designed for
cloud deployment, enabling simplifications and optimizations to mobility, device context
handling and packet processing utilizing the common cloud platform functions. The set of
standardized interfaces should also be carefully considered. Focus should be on those that
are business-critical and avoid time-consuming over-standardization of less relevant
interfaces thereby imposing slow standardization time cycles.
Programmable devices are another interesting area to investigate, where code snippets or
AI models can be downloaded from the network into the devices in order to execute parts of
the network functionality in the devices themselves. This allows for functionality like
mobility or radio-resource management to be tailor-made for a specific scenario without
having to involve time-consuming standardization.
In order to access sufficient spectrum for 6G, co-existence capabilities with already
deployed 4G and 5G systems will be a key requirement. This is particularly important for
lower frequency bands, around 8 GHz and below, as well as for urban/suburban/rural
coverage. Various types of spectrum-sharing mechanisms like coexistence with satellite and
microwave links are of interest. For specific scenarios, very high frequency bands, above
100 GHz, could be exploited. Operation in such frequency bands would be limited to very
specific scenarios where extreme data rates in local areas are required. How to deploy a
system at frequencies above 100GHz, including beamforming and mobility, is an interesting
research challenge. On the hardware side, radio frequency (RF) components for these
frequency ranges are not yet mature for low-cost mass production.
The possibility to integrate a sensing functionality as an integrated part of the wireless-

communication network could be an important capability of future 6G networks. Such
capability can open up a wide range of new use cases for instance input to digital twins,
real-time updates of maps, or using sensing for radio-resource management in the
communication network. Relevant research problems include designing waveforms and
multi-antenna techniques suitable for joint communication and sensing, coexistence
between systems, and how to extract the information of interest from the quantities in the
radio network using AI.
“Zero-energy” devices is another area for 6G research. The energy necessary for operation is
harvested from the surroundings, e.g., vibrations, temperature gradients, or even from the
RF energy itself. Given the minuscule amounts of power possible to harvest, the amount of
data possible to transmit is very small, possibly requiring rethinking many of the existing
protocols and procedures. Energy-harvesting technologies is also a highly relevant research
area.
5.2 Cognitive Networks
To realize future networks without accelerating levels of cost and complexity, 6G must raise
the level of intelligence in the networks. Cognitive networks will help improve efficiency,
service availability, and service versatility. This can be expected to happen in two ways:


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 In optimizations that are difficult to achieve with traditional algorithms utilizing

machine learning (ML)
 In evolving the operations systems to handle most of today’s system management tasks
autonomously utilizing machine reasoning (MR)
The components in a cognitive network include:
 Intent-based automation management – Intents control the system by stating

operational goals, contrary to today’s predominant paradigm of stating a solution. This
intent-based, automated management requires a higher level of abstraction in the
human-machine or machine-internal interface. It also includes the systems’ ability to
interpret and reason around such goals. There is a need to understand abstract
knowledge and draw conclusions from existing knowledge and data sets using MR
techniques. Knowledge and experience will be gathered both from humans and from
analytics algorithms, represented in a common knowledge base. These varying elements
would then be used by a cognitive network to understand the different situations,
identify suitable corrective measures, and plan the best courses of action for their
implementation in the network.
 Autonomous system - A cognitive system requires native capabilities to adjust to its
environment, constantly observing and learning from previous actions. Learnings from
operations and service performance are fed back in short cycles or in near real-time to
improve configurations, processes, and software. Within the network logic, there will be
a continuous improvement in algorithms driving run-time decisions distributed across
physical locations and logical functions. This continuous optimization will make the
system much more dynamic compared to today’s system. Intelligence, in different forms,
will be available all over a geographically distributed network.
 Explainable and trustworthy AI - An autonomous system can only be successful if it is
trusted by humans. This involves several aspects. Firstly, the system needs to be able to
explain its actions and why it ended up in its current state. Secondly, the intelligent
system should act lawfully, respecting all applicable laws, regulations and guidelines;
ethical, respecting the right principles and values; and technically robust while
considering its social environment. Thirdly, the system must involve humans when
needed.
 Data-driven architecture - Intelligence involves making decisions based on facts or
data, and with more data available, better decisions can be made. A data-driven
architecture is the infrastructure for AI algorithms that make decisions. Such
infrastructure supports data pipelines that take care of moving, storing, processing,
visualizing, and exposing data from inside service provider networks as well as external
data sources in a format adapted for the consumer of the pipeline.
5.3 Trustworthy systems
While trustworthiness itself is not characterizable with purely technical solutions it has
connections to reliability, security, safety, and availability of the system. Trust in
technologies is greatly aided by offering evidence of security and performance across the
entire product cycle, while resilience addresses the ability of the system to anticipate,
respond and react to disturbances, errors, faults, and threats.


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Several key technology areas are needed to address a trustworthy system design and to
protect the system against emerging threats. These key technology areas are confidential
computing, secure identities and protocols, service availability mechanisms for critical use,
security assurance, and defense capabilities. Explainable AI-based automation will rely on
data protection and assurance of integrity for security, privacy, safety, and reliability related
functions. AI will be an integral part of the network defense and resilience capabilities for
automating threat detection, risk management, and offering timely response against known
and unknown disturbances. Security assurance schemes together with automated
compliance verification technologies will provide the means for all stakeholders to trust the
components, deployment profiles, and the operations of a 6G network. This trust can be
assured through requirements and processes derived from global standards.
One of the main objectives in trustworthy system design is to provide data and service API
use protection, as well as high data availability in accordance with the needs of different
use-cases and deployment models. Secure identities and protocols protect the data in
transit in mobile networks already. Such a holistic view on required protection features is
the basis of the Zero Trust concept. A further objective is to provide data protecting during
processing and within storage. This will require hardware-level system capabilities of
confidential computing, such as hardware-based isolation for the virtualized workloads,
verification of isolated environments, and root-of-trust (RoT) mechanisms. Thus,
confidential computing can be a fundamental building block for enhancing security of
embedded sub-domains and network slices.
Trustworthy design offers several interesting areas for 6G research. New network
realization technologies and use cases call for enhancing AI-enabled automation around
explainability, security assurance, security defense, and resilient network operation.
Research should be conducted on the application of root-of-trust mechanisms for trusted
identities in a distributed cloud-based computational fabric realizing a network. The
evolving threat landscape will demand improved security and privacy mechanisms in the
protocol stack(s) that is integrated with those being used for computation and storage. As
part of this, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technologies open new possibilities to
execute code and store sensitive data in attestable, dedicated, isolated, and protected areas
of the processing systems.
5.4 Network compute fabric
The emergence of 6G use-cases calls for the convergence of Internet, telecom, media and
information technologies. This convergence will result in a world-wide system of
interconnected systems. The 6G network platform acts not only as a connector, but also
supports real-time control of these interconnected systems putting requirement on
computational and storage capabilities. Thus, 6G will offer computing and storage assets
tightly intertwined with communication.
One important role of a network-compute fabric as part of the 6G network platform is to

facilitate the transformation and convergence of the ecosystems around
telecommunications, IT, enterprises and industries. The scale of the ecosystem precludes
wide usage of bi-lateral agreements between all partners. It will thus be crucial to develop
new operation models to handle this loosely coupled low-trust ecosystem. The network-


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compute fabric could offer a decentralized and broker-less exchange based on smart
contract solutions for virtual services which will help the ecosystem to scale.
Many 6G use-case applications require a combination of geographical distribution paired

with real-time characteristics, such as low latency, high throughput, and high reliability. As
these performance requirements need to be met end-to-end, 6G networks have the
possibility to augment connectivity offerings with a unified execution environment. The
unified execution environment provides fundamental functionalities and services on top of
distributed and heterogenous network, compute, and storage assets. The application is then
provided a compute service that always appears local, despite dynamic network changes or
user/data mobility events.
Ericsson foresees an increasing demand for performance guarantees beyond best effort. As
performance requirements need to be met end-to-end, 6G network platform will be able to
complement connectivity related guarantees with an integrated compute fabric to host and
manage the critical tasks of real-time applications. A complete solution with true end-to-
end guarantees on timing and reliability requires a compute and data infrastructure based
on optimized use of hardware acceleration and an integrated software stack capable of
providing deterministic behavior.
6 Competitor landscape
Summarizing the current view of regional initiatives, the current status is:
 Korea has built up an ambitious plan from the government point of view. Korea is
suggesting trials in 2026 and a first commercializing in 2028. However, the
organization required to support this planning e.g. via research forums is still in a
very early phase.
 In China the focus is on selected research topics, with no clear direction or theme.
Even though areas such as sensing, satellites, native AI, Orbital Angular Momentum
(OAM), and Reconfigurable Intelligent surfaces (RIS) are often highlighted. The
research collaborations are said to be open for all, but in practice non-disclosure
agreements are preventing smooth information sharing in key forums.
 Europe has been first out with deliverables on vision, use cases etc. via the Hexa-X
project. However, the research is only shared between the partners of the Hexa-X
project. There is no clear open platform to discuss 6G in a wider set-up.
 US has initiated the framework within ATIS Next G alliance. A broad group of
companies involved are creating an open platform for 6G discussions. A 6G vision is
being developed and clarifications being made on what technology components to
focus on.
Ericsson is present in all the key activities globally and is monitoring the progress with the
ambition to ensure 6G vision, use cases and systemization is aligned with Ericsson business
and product preferences globally.
From a telecom industry perspective, white papers have been published during 2020 by
Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia, DoCoMo and CMCC. Other companies have shared their views in


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keynote speeches, such as Huawei and conference contributions. Ericsson has also received
6G visions and information via bi-lateral meetings with e.g. Qualcomm.
When comparing the 6G visions of the involved companies, all companies are talking about
intelligence and the connection between physical and digital worlds. Currently, Ericsson’s
vision is the broadest. There is however a general movement to broaden the scope and
bring aspects such as data privacy, security and trust. Additionally, wider visions of a
capable platform enabling different service types of are starting to appear across different
industry actors.
Application demands, social drivers, AI, security and openness (interfaces, open source) are
frequently mentioned drivers for 6G among the industry actors.
7 Ericsson 6G strategy
From an overall perspective Ericsson is envisioning a trusted platform delivering ever-
present intelligent communication including connectivity, data and compute. By enabling AI
to AI communication and digital representation of the real world we are fueling a paradigm
shift.
Ericsson would like to see one global standardized 6G system.
In order to position Ericsson some high-level directions have been outlined:
 Drive industry leadership by taking a leading role in, and contributing towards, targeted
forums in standardization, open source, industry groups and industry activities aligned
with the Ericsson timeline
 Ensure world leading research for new and relevant concepts and technologies
targeting 6G including systemization when relevant in time
 Secure IPR to build a strong 6G patent portfolio
 Secure that 6G standardization is steered to the right forums at the right time for
Ericsson
 Interact with internal testbed activities to trial and verify technology and to
demonstrate leadership
The standardized 6G architecture will provide boundary conditions which Ericsson needs to
relate to. Ericsson shall be, and be perceived as, the leader in 6G architecture. To maintain
freedom to innovate with 6G Ericsson needs to ensure that the 6G architecture is
standardized on the right level.
The 6G architecture shall provide flexibility to be efficient in established business scenarios

as well as enable new types of deployments, new type of customers, and new type of
requirements and networks. Ericsson shall target one 6G architecture for everything from
dedicated small networks to large macro networks.
Ericsson shall promote an open and scalable device eco-system based on a well specified
radio interface. Ericsson shall also promote a limited amount of well specified network


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internal interfaces that will be used in multi-vendor operation. Ericsson proprietary

extensions should be possible to add on all network internal interfaces. Ericsson shall
advocate specifications and standards which allow for a large set of features while at the
same time limit the complexity for each feature implementation.

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Ericsson Internal Report 1 (14)

Technology Report - 6G update

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

GFTL-22:000434 Uen A 2022-04-11

Ericsson Internal Report 2 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

GFTL-22:000434 Uen A 2022-04-11

mainframe computers via personal workstations into today’s micro-service-based cloud

Ericsson Internal Report 3 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

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The Ericsson preferred timeline is (see Figure 1):

Figure 1: Ericsson preferred 6G timeline and activities.

Ericsson is active in the external 6G research discussions to influence the industry in a

The society of 2030 is expected to have transformed around increasingly advanced

 Application demands: There is already today a very strong increase in highly

Ericsson Internal Report 4 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

GFTL-22:000434 Uen A 2022-04-11

Figure 2: Examples of technology forces and tools essential for 6G innovation.

Ericsson Internal Report 5 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

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3 Use case evolution

 Connected intelligent machines –

These use cases indicate new services where 6G need to be enabled.

A continuous evolution of the three service areas of 5G is foreseen to continue over 5G

eMBB à eMBB+ à Immersive communication, providing intense human, machine, and

Ericsson Internal Report 6 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

GFTL-22:000434 Uen A 2022-04-11

Figure 4: Service area evolution towards 6G.

 an integration of communication and compute resources together with AI functionality

Ericsson Internal Report 7 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

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4 Evolution towards 6G capabilities

Figure 5: Example of future 6G system capabilities.

Ericsson Internal Report 8 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

GFTL-22:000434 Uen A 2022-04-11

Deployment flexibility is the set of capabilities required to handle dynamic network

5.1 Limitless connectivity

A wide range of technologies need to be investigated to fulfill the limitless connectivity

Ericsson Internal Report 9 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

GFTL-22:000434 Uen A 2022-04-11

The possibility to integrate a sensing functionality as an integrated part of the wireless-

5.2 Cognitive Networks

Ericsson Internal Report 10 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

GFTL-22:000434 Uen A 2022-04-11

 In optimizations that are difficult to achieve with traditional algorithms utilizing

The components in a cognitive network include:

 Intent-based automation management – Intents control the system by stating

5.3 Trustworthy systems

Ericsson Internal Report 11 (14)

EPATRPE Patrik Persson C GFTLIC [Fredrik Svahn]

GFTL-22:000434 Uen A 2022-04-11

5.4 Network compute fabric

One important role of a network-compute fabric as part of the 6G network platform is to

Ericsson Internal Report 12 (14)