6G R&D and Standardization Competition Has Already Begun

China, Japan and the European Union are accelerating the development of 6G communications technology. In this regard, South Korean experts held an open forum in Seoul on Feb. 11 to discuss issues related to 6G preparations in South Korea.

6G communications can be characterized by extreme ubiquity realized in a terahertz frequency band. It is expected to converge with 5G for drone, infrastructure and satellite network interconnection and contribute greatly to the growth of the media industry. Currently, separated communications and industrial technologies will be combined with each other for a significant synergy of convergence.

Experts at the forum pointed out that South Korea needs to make more efforts to lead technological development and standardization in the emerging field. 6G requires integrated communications-computing terminals, battery capacity expansion, computing performance improvement, and so on based on technological compatibility with 5G. In addition, in the 6G era, cloud computing, mobile edge computing, switches and devices as various computing resources based on distributed mobile computing are expected to expand their scopes.
 

China, the European Union, South Korea, Japan, the United States and Finland are likely to lead the standardization competition in the near future. China and the European players already entered the race with Huawei and Nokia at the forefront, respectively.

The European Union is planning to move ahead with a follow-up project to the Horizon Europe program from 2021 to 2027 in order to interlink 6G and 5G+, which is a concept including smart factory, immersive media and intelligent security. China came up with a national 6G R&D plan in November last year. In Finland, the University of Oulu has held a series of related events, including the 6G Wireless Summit, since 2018.

In South Korea, mobile carriers and device manufacturers have signed memoranda of understanding for 6G R&D since May last year. The South Korean government is currently conducting preliminary feasibility studies for national 6G R&D and is going to prepare a national 6G roadmap by the first half of this year.