Samsung Electronics had published a white paper introducing its 6G vision in July 2020
Samsung Electronics released a white paper that lays out the company’s vision for securing global frequency bands for future 6G technology.
The paper, titled “6G Spectrum: Expanding the Frontier,” discusses ways to obtain the spectrum needed to achieve the company’s 6G vision introduced in a white paper released earlier in July 2020.
“We have started on our journey long ago to understand, develop and standardize the 6G communications technology,” said Sunghyun Choi, executive vice president and head of the Advanced Communications Research Center at Samsung Research. “We are committed to taking the lead and sharing our findings to spread our vision to bring the next hyper-connected experience to every corner of life.”
According to Samsung Electronics, 6G would require spectrum with ultra-wideband contiguous bandwidth ranging from hundreds of MHz to tens of GHz to enable new services such as high-fidelity mobile holograms and truly immersive extended reality (XR) that are characterized by ultra-high speed communications and large amount of data. In response to these requirements, Samsung proposes considering all available bands for 6G, from low-band under 1 GHz, to mid-band in the 1-24 GHz range and high-band in the 24-300 GHz range.
The South Korean vendor also highlights the importance of securing new bands for commercial deployments of 6G, as 5G networks will still be operational when the 6G deployment starts. “The mid-band within the 7-24 GHz range is a candidate that can support faster data speed and reasonable coverage. The sub-terahertz (sub-THz) band in the 92–300 GHz range is being considered for support of ultra-high speed data rate,” Samsung said.
The white paper also mentions the re-farming of existing bands used for 3G, 4G and 5G networks to 6G operation as another way to obtain all the spectrum necessary for 6G. It also notes that research on forward-looking regulations and technologies on spectrum utilization is essential to provide efficient and flexible support of 6G and other services with the limited spectrum.
Samsung also highlights its research findings on some of 6G candidate technologies – specifically about sub-THz band communications, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), cross division duplex (XDD), full duplex, artificial intelligence (AI)-based nonlinearity compensation (AI-NC) and AI-based energy saving (AI-ES).
Sub-THz is considered a spectrum candidate for 6G communications, which is expected to support the data rate up to 1 Terabits per second (Tbps).
“RIS can improve the beam sharpness and can steer or reflect the wireless signal to a desired direction with the use of a metamaterial surface. It can reduce the penetration loss and blockage of high frequency signal, e.g., mmWave. Samsung demonstrated that their RIS lens technology can enhance the signal strength by four times and the beam steering range by 1.5 times.”
Samsung also noted that XDD can improve the propagation distance of uplink signal up to two times in the TDD system by enabling the continuous uplink transmission in a small portion of the system bandwidth.
With full duplex, the data transmission and reception can take place simultaneously using the same frequency so that the data speed increases up to two times, while AI-NC utilizes AI at the receiver to compensate the signal distortion caused by the nonlinearity of a transmitter’s power amplifier and hence, can significantly improve the coverage and quality of high-rate data signals.
Also, AI-ES capitalizes on AI to minimize energy consumption at the base station by adjusting the parameters controlling the power on/off of selected cells depending on traffic load, without affecting network performance, Samsung said.
