Samsung Sets Out Plan for 6G Mobile Broadband at 1Tbps Speeds

South Korean tech giant Samsung, which has historically played a major role in the development of new mobile network technologies, has this week published some of its early research findings into the future 6th Generation (6G) of mobile broadband technology and set out what sort of technologies it may incorporate.

At present much of the world is still only just in the early phases of deploying commercial 5G networks, which have been designed to harness radio spectrum bands from the low 450MHz and all the way up to the millimetre wave (mmW) of 52GHz.

In theory, 5G can deliver peak (shared capacity) download speeds of up to 20Gbps (10Gbps upload) and latency times as low as 1-4ms. But in the real-world, such performance is often much slower due to various reasons, such as the differing distributions of spectrum frequency between operators, the lack of standalone 5G networks (many 5G networks still use some 4G infrastructure) and signal degradation over distance.

The next generation of 6G technology is still in the early research and development (R&D) phase, but after two years of work, Samsung has now set out the spectrum foundations (published here) for what it believes 6G should become and the technologies that will be needed to support it.

As usual with these things, it’s often necessary to wade through a mass of hyperbole – often encapsulated by the same sort of highly aspirational claims that preceded 4G and 5G networks before it (just put ‘ultra’ or ‘hyper’ in front of every claim, and you get the idea) – in order to get to the nitty-gritty of what sort of technologies Samsung thinks 6G will actually include. We’ve attempted to summarise these below.

One key goal here is to achieve data rates of up to 1Tbps (Terabits per second or 1000 Gigabits per second), although we’d tend to treat that in much the same way as people should treat the 20Gbps target for 5G (i.e. not likely to be very reflective of the real-world experience).

Samsung’s Proposed 6G Technologies and Enhancements

➤ Adopting sub-THz Bands

6G will harness the same spectrum bands as 5G, but it will also go beyond 52GHz and potentially push up to 300GHz. The high-band frequency range can consist of two sub-frequency ranges, i.e., the mmWave band (24-92 GHz) – to be used as an important band not only for 5G but also for 6G – and the sub-THz band (92-300 GHz) as a new frontier band for 6G.

Samsung has in the past also talked about pushing into the TeraHertz (THz) band – c. 1000GHz – too, but perhaps mercifully their final paper remains laser focused on the getting the most out of sub-THz or mmW bands. In our view, this is a good move since 5G has struggled to make mmW work in an economically viable way.

A prototype of Samsung’s 6G technology in THz spectrum – using phased-array beamforming capability – achieved speeds of 12Gbps at 30 metres distance (indoors) and 2.3Gbps at 120 metres outdoors. This is actually pretty impressive, given the band, but we’re still a long way from 1Tbps speeds (more on that later).

➤ Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)

High frequency signals generally have short propagation distance and cannot pass through obstacles, resulting in a limited coverage. Samsung has developed an RIS technology that can steer or reflect the wireless signal to a desired direction to by using a metamaterial lens for coverage improvement.

➤ Cross Division Duplex (XDD)

In mobile communications, a mobile phone has a small transmission power than a base station and hence limits the possible communications distance. Samsung has demonstrated that the propagation distance of mobile phone’s signal can be improved two times through the use of XDD.

➤ Full Duplex

Samsung has achieved 1.9 times improvement of data transmission speed through use of the full duplex technology that enables simultaneous transmission and reception in the same frequency by removing the self-interference between them.

➤ Al-Based Nonlinearity Compensation (AI-NC)

A severe distortion can happen when the signal transmission power increases to enlarge the propagation distance, resulting in the failure of communications. Through Al technologies to compensate the distortion at the receiver, the high speed communication distance can be improved by 1.9 times.

➤ Al-Based Energy Saving (AI-ES)

About more than 10% of base station energy consumption can be saved with the Al technology that minimizes power consumption by turning base stations off and on according to the amount of data traffic.

On the question of how an operator might expect to achieve speeds of 1Tbps in the future, Samsung proposed several technical assumptions for delivering on this. For example, they could use (sorry if this gets a bit technical) 62.5GHz of bandwidth with 256 QAM and MIMO rank-2 ideally (83GHz assuming 25% overhead) or 22.8GHz bandwidth with 2048 QAM and MIMO rank-4 (30.4GHz assuming 25% overhead). In short, operators will need a LOT of spectrum.

However, this is only Samsung’s plan, and they are by no means the only group contributing to the development of 6G, so what they think the technology will look like could differ from the approach that others take. The first draft 6G standard could arrive soon, although most people anticipate that it’ll be 2030 before we see the first commercial deployments (field trials will usually begin much sooner).

The biggest challenge in all this typically stems from being able to deliver good coverage at the highest mobile frequencies (e.g. the mmWave bands). Such bands will often deliver the best speeds because there’s plenty of spectrum frequency to go around (more spectrum = more data), but the caveat is that signals in the mmW bands are weak and don’t go very far.

Mobile operators thus end up either having to build extremely dense and hugely expensive mobile networks to make the most of this (many operators have rightly balked at that idea), or they limit related deployments, such as to only focus on fixed wireless links (connecting homes/businesses) or serving specific areas of high footfall (shopping malls, events, airports etc).

One way or another, we don’t think 6G is necessarily going to change the dial much on the sweet spot for mobile connectivity. Operators will still look toward the sub-6GHz bands as the most viable for delivering wide coverage, but 6G does look as if it’ll be able to improve performance in those bands too. Only time will tell by how much.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that 6G, much like 5G before it, will also need to be fed by high capacity fibre optic cables in order to get the best speeds.