6G Set to Primarily Be an Industrial IoT Network

Cellular-based positioning technology for critical IoT industrial cases will be one of the key elements in future 6G networks.

6G Set to Primarily Be an Industrial IoT Network

Despite the fact that 5G network currently only starts to get in use in most of the markets, and that networks for commercial organizations relate to non-standalone, the experiments on 6G mobile networks are actively conducted nowadays. The IoT is involved in testing the technologies.

The significant part of population believes that the latest mobile network is 5G, invented at the end of the previous century. Thanks to getting a few gadgets connected, it allows to increase the speed and as a result to play some low-latency online games and watch videos in higher quality.

From the point of view of cellular service providers and industry stakeholders, 5G network is the next stage of mobile communication, which gave the possibility to switch phone calls on data as the main method of remote communication. In 5G New Radio it was possible to achieve the necessary level of quality and reliability for industrial implementation.

At the moment cellular service providers are launching the standalone 5G networks which are able to maintain functions needed for IoT services, for instance, low latency and network slicing. 5G Advanced, also known as 5G+, will come into use in 2025. They will suggest all the services of 5G for high-performance applications: autonomous driving, modern robotics, distant control and maintenance, IoT and industrial metaverse.

Gathering the information from diverse resources, organizations create digital twins which help them invent industrial IoT decisions. They also use artificial intelligence and analytics in order to get useful information. This way, organizations are able to create products and services with the help of multidirectional models.

As soon as 5G networks become irrelevant for the current technologies, the next 6G networks will appear to provide the necessary functions for modern gadgets and innovations.

What is 6G?
GSMA Intelligence published a report saying that the possibility of creating any applications depends on the technologies accessible at the moment. In case of 6G, the concrete services become possible based on the following technic parameters. The throughputs have to increase by 10 times, latency has to decrease, then extended reality, robotics, holographics and the metaverse will become possible to realize.

Not only higher speed and extremely low latency, but also location and sensing functions will be accessible thanks to 6G. These features are needed for functioning of the industrial metaverse and automation of diverse applications which consequently do not exist. Among the applications requiring accurate data on the location are robot navigation, worker safety and robot navigation.

(Source: Nokia Bell Labs)

In the past few years there have been conducted many researches and tests of 6G networks by research institutions and infrastructure providers. At the Mobile World Congress 2023 a famous institution named Nokia presented a 6G demo. Nokia Bell Labs showed 6G sensing capability, that applies radio equipment, demonstrating interaction of networks and the outer world through the “radar”.

Thierry Klein, president of Bell Labs Solutions Research at Nokia, shared his views on the subject of networks development. Their team believes that 6G is not only the mobile network, it is needed to consider other spheres of life. Not only technic parameters such as reliability or latency are important. In case of using networks in industrial enterprises, sensing becomes a useful option.

From Thierry Klein’s point if view, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact the companies act more from the position of the outcome. Before they select the type of the network, they ask a question of the result they could get from each of them. They wonder what the difference between the networks types and how these types are going to influence the company’s outcome.

Peter Vetter, president of Bell Labs Core Research at Nokia, noticed that 6G networks provide us with the data about surrounding space which wasn’t possible earlier. Among the ways of implementation of this sensing function there is gathering the real-time information by digital twins of factories and smart cities so as to improve the flow of robots, humans and vehicles. Thanks to the technology we will be able to learn about dangers such as speeding vehicles arriving from around the corner. Moreover, it expected that in the future increased accuracy of 6G networks will allow us to communicate with the help of body language and gestures, and not using touchscreens and controller interfaces.

Klein is responsible for conduction of researches on industrial solutions at Nokia. Taking such a position and being an expert in the question, he finds that 6G will provide the industrial sphere with the advantages of 5G networks. It will serve as a connector of billions of gadgets among which are consumer appliances, factory machines and autonomous vehicles. Thanks to the simultaneous combination of IoT, high efficiency, AI and edge processing access to Industry 4.0 will be accessible to everybody.

The connection by the means of mobile networks includes many different objects: people, spaces, sensors, machines and surrounding space. As Thierry Klein believes, except the function of connection itself it is necessary to define the purpose for which all these things have to be connected. As well as you have to know which things you actually connect, how they should behave and where they should be situated. In the process such functions as localization, sensing, positioning and operational environment are involved.
Klein’s team is engaged in all of these topics in order to bring to life networking edge compute, AI and diverse ICT technologies helping to optimize work in industrial sphere.

In the conditions of increasing consumption of energy and data by public spaces and private users, it is needed to consider the aspects of balance of performance and sustainability. The sectors of information and communications are anticipated to shift to renewables at more than 60% of general electricity consumption by 2030. Nonetheless, 6G will be more effective in distribution of the energy from high-energy users.

Sanjay Uppal, SVP and general manager of the Service Provider and Edge business unit at VMware, predicts that the lack of energy sources is the problem which will spread from only Europe to all over the world. That is why we have to address to the energy consumption as one of the main factors while choosing information technology.