5G Advanced The first step towards 6G

The first tranche of 5G networks have been rolled out around the world – but that is just the start. Part of 5G’s charm is that it is designed to continuously evolve and the next step – 5G Advanced – is here, but is it the bridge to 6G, wonders Paul

Is it too soon? Too soon to talk about 6G? With 5G only just being rolled out in many places –and with as many as 68% of the world’s mobile phone users not yet using it – it seems premature to talk about 6G. Yet here we are, talking about it.

And for good reason. 6G is on its way and will be one of the key topics being talked about at Mobile World Congress 2024 because of how 5G has helped change the world.

5G has introduced a world of lower latency, higher bandwidth connectivity that has played no small part in ushering in the era of AI and Web3.0. And that very success is what drives talk of what must come next.

But 5G was designed to evolve and that is exactly what it is doing: with the latest iterations offering some new functionalities and offering MNOs an opportunity to generate new revenues from what they can do.

WHAT IS 5G ADVANCED?

The first of these is 5G Advanced – or 3GPP Release 19, to give it its proper name – offers a wide range of enhancements to 5G that make it even more suited to the AI-led world we live in today and builds a bridge towards 6G.

The improvements delivered by 5G Advanced cover a range of technical issues that unleash a torrent of acronyms – Uplink and Downlink MIMO evolution, layer 2 device mobility enhancements, advanced network topology, and on-going improvements to SON, MDT and RACH – but what that means in practical terms is the 5G Advanced will support capabilities beyond data communication that can further enhance user experiences.

For instance, Release 19 will further improve device ranging and positioning accuracy for use cases like navigation. Sidelink will play an increasingly important role in 5G Advanced systems, not only for improving positioning and ranging performance, but also for data offloading and for connecting new devices, like wearables and XR glasses.

This offers a raft of new services for MNOs to offer and for SPs to monetise. It also puts 5G very much at the centre of enabling AI everywhere in everything, as well as being an underpinning technology for the metaverse.

It is also much more environmentally friendly. We tend to not think about the energy consumption of the mobile network, it all seems to be invisible magic to the user, but they are quite energy-hungry.

5G Advanced aims to define an evaluation model with associated KPIs that measure system energy consumption performance and study a variety of power-saving techniques. The objective is to improve energy savings across diverse system deployment scenarios. Additionally, there is an ongoing effort to introduce a brand-new, very low-power WUS design aiming to substantially reduce inactive mode device power consumption.

And of course, 5G Advanced offers more capacity and faster speeds.

THE ROAD TO 6G

It also sets the telecoms industry on the road to 6G. It helps evolve the technology used in 5G networks towards the telecoms Holy Grail of full duplex, which offers the ability to transmit and receive simultaneously on the same band – so my mother can talk over me on the phone just as she does in real life – which is a key aim of 6G.

It also enables a raft of new spectra, specifically in the 7 to 24GHz range. This is vital for meeting the insatiable capacity demand that the wireless ecosystem is starting to see as everything gets connected and those connections have to carry vast amounts of rich data.

It also sets up the networks for something really quite amazing: RF sensing. This uses the radio waves of 5G to located and map in 3D any item, so that devices can now be used to sense what is around them and transmit that information. This is the sci-fi end of the 6G proposal, but it is very much something that is covered within the scope of 5G Advanced and could well be a real game changer for service providers.