Omnitele has joined 6G Flagship ecosystem to support the research and development of the next generation mobile technologies. The 6G Flagship is a research program focusing on 6G and its applications which was initiated by the University of Oulu. Their research is operated by a team of 400 researchers in cooperation with broad ecosystem of collaborators, including among others, University of Oulu, Aalto University, VTT, Nokia, and Business Oulu. The 6G Flagship research started in 2018 with a 251 million euro budget framework for an eight-year period (2018 – 2026), partly as the University of Oulu in Finland has been one of the pioneers in wireless communications research for decades.
6G is expected to emerge somewhere around 2030, as new mobile generations appear approximately every ten years. According to Mika Rantakokko, liaison manager of 6G Flagship, 6G will have new technologies that satisfy new communication demands such as faster speed, higher precision, and a ten times higher efficiency. 6G will thus provide numerous improvements to current wireless network capabilities, such as tera-bit-per-second (Tbps) wireless data rates, smaller radio latencies of 0.1 milliseconds, and increased energy efficiency and reliability for more sustainable applications. 6G is aiming at using the higher frequency ranges now not utilised in the upper mmW and THz frequency band that will provide greatly enhanced data rates. These frequency bands will also improve network throughput and network sharing in especially densely populated areas. 6G will thus present vast improvement potential to wireless communications and its applications, yet there are many questions on how to reach these advancements.
Since 2018, the 6G Flagship program has produced thirteen white papers in collaboration of 250 experts from 100 organisations in over 30 countries. The research program has become a known brand and is defining the 6G research agenda globally. Their research has four key areas of focus: wireless connectivity, devices and circuitry, distributed computing, and services and applications.
6G Flagship is also collaborating and supporting companies with their 5G deployment, so researchers can study the gaps between 5G and 6G. This guides the research community where extra effort and improvements are needed. One key driver for 6G is how data is collected, processed and consumed in different parts of a network. For example, with greater amounts of data transferred, latency has to be low in communication between machines. Thus, improvements are needed in key 5G technologies, such as ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC), to provide the reliability and speed needed in future low-latency wireless networks.
In ten years, 6G will become a vital part of our lives as we continue to rely on wireless communication. “We will have a data driven society, which will be enabled by near-instant, unlimited wireless connectivity”, Rantakokko notes. “What kind of use cases, applications and benefits will emerge from unlimited wireless connectivity is depending on our innovativiness and creativity”
For more information about how to collaborate in the 6G Flagship research, you can contact Mika Rantakokko ([email protected]) or leave a message here. The research program is open to different levels of collaboration with international companies and research entities, based on their interests and needs.
Subscribe to our newsletter
get the latest news delivered directly in your inbox