Texas Project For 6G

A 6G research centre at the University Of Texas has been set up, backed by AT&T, Nvidia, Samsung America, Qualcomm and InterDigital.

Called 6G@UT the project envisages each of the founding companies sponsoring at least two specific three-year projects, including new sensing methods, wireless-specific machine learning algorithms and networking innovations.

“The advances in both wireless communications and machine learning over the past decade have been incredible, but separate,” says project director Professor Jeffrey Andrews, “Coupled with vast new sensing and localization abilities, 6G will be defined by an unprecedented native intelligence, which will transform the ability of the network to provide incredible services.”

“5G’s vision of sensing has been insufficiently bold,” says Todd Humphreys, associate professor in UT Austin’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, “6G should begin with the premise that sensing is not just for reacting to conditions, but anticipating them, so that vital links to automated vehicles, AR/VR headsets, and other latency-sensitive applications can be maintained with utter reliability.”

The university said: “Other major pillars of the new centre and crucial parts of 6G, include the need to open new spectrum and low Earth orbit satellite links to improve coverage across rural and urban areas and design new network architectures to enable better resource and infrastructure sharing,” adding that next generation networks “will be loaded with radar, vision, audio, lidar, thermal, seismic and broadband software-defined radio sensors that will provide unprecedented situational awareness to applications and devices running on the network.”