Samsung heir lays out 6G vision in new white paper

Samsung Electronics on Tuesday announced its vision for the sixth-generation telecommunications network by releasing a white paper supervised by Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong.

The white paper entitled “The Next Hyper-Connected Experience for All,” outlines Samsung’s vision for 6G, covering various aspects related to the next-generation network system, including technical and societal megatrends, new services, requirements, candidate technologies and an expected timeline of standardization.

In the report, Samsung expects that the completion of the 6G standard and its earliest commercialization date could be as early as 2028, while mass commercialization may occur around 2030.

Both humans and machines will be the main users of 6G, and 6G will be characterized by provision of advanced services such as truly immersive extended reality, high-fidelity mobile hologram and digital replica, the report noted.

Samsung defines three categories of requirements that have to be met to realize 6G services -- performance, architectural and trustworthiness requirements.

Examples of 6G performance requirements are a peak data rate of 1,000 gigabits per second and air latency less than 100 microseconds, 50 times the peak data rate and one-tenth the latency of 5G, according to the document.

The report also introduces candidate technologies that could be essential to satisfy the requirements for 6G, including the terahertz frequency band, novel antennas, advanced duplex technologies, advanced network topology, spectrum sharing to increase the efficiency of frequency utilization and artificial intelligence-applied wireless technologies.

Samsung Research, the research and development arm of Samsung’s set business, has been working on 6G since May last year, by establishing a separate research group named as Advanced Communications Research Center.

“While 5G commercialization is still in its initial stage, it’s never too early to start preparing for 6G because it typically takes around 10 years from the start of research to commercialization of a new generation of communications technology,” explained Choi Sung-hyun, head of the 6G center.

“We’ve already launched the R&D of 6G technologies by building upon the experience and ability we have accumulated from working on multiple generations of communications technology, including 5G.”

The company highlighted that Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong -- the de facto leader of the tech giant -- has been leading establishment of the 6G vision, in which he set a goal of outstripping Samsung’s global competitors in the network equipment market, such as Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia.

Regarding 6G, Lee emphasized consistent and continuous investments for the future in a recent meeting with top executives.

By Song Su-hyun (song@heraldcorp.com)