Chinese make 6G transmission over current 4G networks

A group of telecommunications engineers in China have established what they claim is the world’s first field test network for semantic communication, capable of achieving 6G transmissions over current 4G infrastructures, according to the Xinhua news agency. The team from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications said they achieved the feat through “intelligent integration”.

The experimental network also showed a gain of up to 10 times in the main communication metrics, including capacity, coverage and efficiency, according to the team of researchers.

The new platform facilitates the efforts of institutions in theoretical research and initial verification of the main 6G technologies. For researchers, it can effectively reduce the barriers to entry for 6G network research, promoting innovation.

The South China Morning Post reported that, at a conference in Beijing, university professor Zhang Ping revealed that, in order to break new ground in this field, his team’s research had to migrate from “stacked innovation” to “disruptive innovation”, referring to semantic communication, an intelligent system that conveys meaning and not just data. The researchers believe that there is potential to apply this approach to make data transmission systems more efficient and reduce information processing costs.

The professor also said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can transform communication and that, in turn, 6G technology can also accelerate the development of AI. “AI will improve the perception and semantic understanding of communication, while the ubiquitous communication of 6G will extend the reach of artificial intelligence to every corner of every field,” said Zhang.

China plans to start commercializing 6G networks around 2030, while it expects the standards for the technology to be defined in 2025.

NVidia in the area

NVidia has a 6G research platform that offers researchers an approach to developing solutions for the new wireless communication technology. The NVidia 6G Research Cloud is open, flexible, interconnected and made up of three main elements:

• NVidia Aerial Omniverse Digital Twin for 6G: reference and sample application for developers that allows accurate simulations to be made of complete 6G systems, from a single tower to the proportions of a city. Using Omniverse Aerial Digital Twin, researchers can simulate and develop algorithms for base stations taking into account site-specific data and train models in real time to improve transmission efficiency.
• NVidia Aerial CUDA-Accelerated RAN: software-defined stack that offers high flexibility for customizing, programming and testing 6G networks in real time.
• NVidia Sionna Neural Radio Framework: framework for seamless integration with other popular frameworks, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, using NVidia GPUs to generate and capture data and train Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning models at scale. It also includes NVidia Sionna, the leading link-level research tool for AI-based wireless simulation and machine learning.

“The future convergence of 6G and AI promises a transformative technological landscape. It will bring seamless connectivity and intelligent systems that will redefine our interactions with the digital world, ushering in an era of unparalleled innovation and connectivity,” says Charlie Zhang, senior vice president of Samsung Research America.

Samsung, Ansys, Arm, ETH Zurich, Fujitsu, Keysight, Nokia, Northeastern University, Rohde & Schwarz, Samsung, SoftBank Corp and Viavi are among the first members of this NVidia ecosystem.

To access the NVidia 6G Research Cloud platform, researchers must sign up for the NVidia 6G Developer Program.