NGA said the report is aimed at technology providers, spectrum licensees and regulators
ATIS’ Next G Alliance (NGA) has put out a new report that evaluates a range of spectrum management and access mechanisms, including sharing regimes, to maximize North American opportunities in 6G.
The report, “Spectrum Access Mechanisms”, includes assessments of licensed, unlicensed and shared use and considers deployment and operational aspects of incumbent systems in-band or in adjacent bands.
“This report advances the NGA’s work to proactively address the spectrum issues of a Next G world,” said ATIS Next G Alliance Managing Director Jaydee Griffith. “It builds on earlier NGA publications on spectrum, including the papers titled 6G Spectrum Considerations and Spectrum Needs for 6G, and further explores evolving spectrum management and access types.”
“How spectrum is accessed for next generation communications is critical to ensuring that North America has adequate spectrum resources,” said Andrew Thiessen, chair of the Next G Alliance Spectrum Working Group. “There has been past work on unlicensed, shared licensed, and exclusively licensed spectrum; however, going forward, we will need to significantly evolve leveraging all three types of spectrum access to ultimately meet the spectrum needs.”
Last month, NGA announced the publication of a new study of 6G communication channels and joint communication and sensing (JCAS)/integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) channel models.
NGA noted that JCAS/ISAC is one of the key new features for future 6G systems, where existing telecommunication infrastructure is also used for RF sensing without requiring an active transmission from targets to be sensed.
The entity highlighted that JCAS/ISAC introduces new use cases and unleashes “broad possibilities” for automated vehicles, healthcare, entertainment, smart industry and smart cities as well as novel uses of spectrum. Specific to joint communication and sensing modeling, based on extensive measurements performed by NGA members, the report includes multiple sensing target models and an indoor background clutter model for monostatic sensing, NGA said.
In January, NGA had published a white paper that looked at the transformative role that future 6G technology is expected to play in enhancing integrated sensing and communication systems.
NGA said that next-generation systems will enable distributed sensors and communication networks to implement an integrated exchange of data, allowing systems of sensors to work together. These will provide the network with critical analytics to upgrade configurations and improve performance, NGA said, adding that these systems will enable new user capabilities.
The Next G Alliance was launched by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), as an initiative to advance North American wireless technology leadership over the next decade through private sector-led efforts with the initial focus on as-yet-unstandardized 6G.
