IAFI hosts 2nd international e-workshop on ITU 6G vision

The ITU-APT Foundation of India (IAFI) under the leadership of Bharat Bhatia hosted 2nd international e-workshop on ITU’s 6G Vision Recommendation.

The event witnessed a look into the future of 6G where Virtual and Mixed Reality (VR/MR) and holographic telepresence will become the norm for both work and social interactions. Via holographic telepresence it will be possible to make it appear as though one is in a certain location while really being in a different location – for example, appearing to be in the office while actually being in the car. This can also mean virtual traveling to far-away places and telepresence meetings with friends and family. You would experience the world where your hologram is, through very rich sensing of multiple sorts, synchronized to devices on your body for an enhanced sensory experience such as gesture, intonation, expressions, surrounding sounds, touch, feel and smell through interaction between physical and digital objects, enabled by wearable devices, such as earbuds and devices embedded in our clothing and other novel user interfaces.

The event included presentations by RK Pathak Deputy Director General of the DOT, Dr. Alok Nath Dey Chief Technology Officer of Samsung India R&D, Dr. Sendil Kumar Director of, Ericsson, Jitender Singh, Senior director of Qualcomm, Professor. Radha Krishna Ganti of IIT Madras, Vikram Tiwathia Deputy Director General of Cellular Operators Association of on India.

The workshop began with an opening welcome note by T. R Dua, Director General of the Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA) and chairman of IAFI. The workshop was attended by more than 70 Telecom professionals, Sr. Government Officials, and ICT experts from different parts of the world.

RK Pathak Deputy Director General of the DOT emphasizing that 6G is critical for India and we would like to be part of the 6G innovation from the beginning itself. He also noted that while India missed out in the earlier generations of mobile technologies, 6G is more software-oriented and can be pioneered by our young engineers and software professionals to help create a pathway for the vision of Digital India.

IAFI President Bharat B Bhatia, presented the background on the ITU work in the area of Mobile technology standards known as IMT family. He also laid down the proposed timeline for development of 6G – IMT 2030.

Jitender Singh spoke about the Qualcomm’s 6G vision and how the gaps in enabling technologies should be covered by the industry and research community. He also talked about the evolution of 5G into 6G with support from the global standardization activities. The vision included the merging of the real and virtual world using Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence. He also provided a glimpse of 6G global initiative which has already begun in Korea, Japan & China.

Professor. Radha Krishna Ganti from IIT Madras elaborated on technology trends towards 6G in areas such as a Large MIMO configuration, full duplex communication followed with quantum communication, which will lead to the better implementation of the 6G vision by the usage of drones and machines, which will be the building blocks for smart cities and IoT.

Vikram Tiwathia, DDG COAI spoke on the benefits of 5G in shaping the 6G vision, he also mentioned the Sydney Dialogue, which focuses utilization of less earth resources.

A presentation towards the Ericsson’s 6G vision was given by Dr. Sendil Kumar, which focused on standard and industry initiatives. 6G stands out as a cyber-physical continuum, focusing on ease if sustainable development which lead to a concept of massive twinning that brings forwards a fully submerged cyber-physical world. This is followed by a dynamic trusted local connectivity which is completely seamless due to the execution of the 6G vision. He also summarized as set of 6G use case families as a part of IMT-2030 Vision as shown below:

Bashir Patel, Director of INMARSAT and Peng Zhao, Director of Bharti Telecom’s One web presented the importance of satellite connectivity which has the advantage that can provide low-latency broadband communications to any point on the earth, in particular for Aircrafts and Ships in high seas using mega constellation of NGSO satellites and drones integrated with terrestrial networks to provide ubiquitous high quality mobile broadband services.

It is also expected that future networks and systems will be a mixture of the physical, biological and digital representation in every spatial and time instant, unifying human experience across these aspects. New themes are likely to emerge that will shape the future system requirements and technologies, such as:

• new human–machine interfaces created by a collection of multiple local devices acting in unison;

• ubiquitous computing distributed among end devices, base stations, edges and the cloud;

• multi-sensory data fusion to create multi-verse maps and new mixed-reality experiences;

• precision sensing and actuation to understand and control the physical world.

• mega constellation of VLEOs and drones integrated with terrestrial networks to provide ubiquitous high quality mobile broadband services.

With rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence, it has the potential to become the foundation for systems and network in the future, making data, computation and energy the new resources to be exploited for achieving superior performance.

ITU-APT Foundation of India (ITU-APT) is a non-profit, non-political, non-partisan Industry foundation registered as a society under the Societies Registration Act, 1960. ITU-APT is working for last 18 years with the prime objective of encouraging involvement of professionals, corporate, public/private sector industries, R&D organizations, academic institutions, and such other agencies engaged in development of Indian Telecom sector in the activities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT).

The Foundation has been recognized as an International/Regional Telecommunications Organization by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). ITU-APT is also having close working relations with similar organizations in many other countries including, Japan, Indonesia and USA.

Our members include many stalwarts of the telecom sector including many previous secretaries, members, advisors and DDGs of the DOT and Telecom Commission. We also have many corporate members from India and other countries including operators, vendors. The foundation has been responding to various government consultations in the past.
CT Bureau