The wireless cellular communication industry has always pushed boundaries. Waves of mobile-network generations — or Gs — have introduced a multitude of features, capabilities and improvements that have led to today’s 5G networks. Although 5G provides substantial improvements and serves multiple modern use cases, the industry is already discussing the key enabling technologies and requirements for 6G, with a target rollout date of 2030.

Building on previous generations’ trends, 6G technology is expected to drive exciting and far-reaching societal shifts in digital economic growth, sustainability, digital equality, trust and quality of life. But what are the technologies that will actually make it happen? This blog post aims to provide some insight.

What Is 6G, and What Will It Require?

A recurring theme among standardization organizations is an attempt to define where 5G ends and 6G begins in terms of offered use cases and associated key enabling technologies. The lines between 5G and 6G couldn’t be any blurrier, thanks to the release of two feature-rich 5G-Advanced releases of, which are intended to serve as a collective bridge to 6G.

The realization of the 6G standard will depend on a collection of key enabling technologies. This collection can be split into two sub-groups:

• The first sub-group will be made up of further enhancements and improvements to 5G and 5G-Advanced capabilities such as mmWave, Advanced MIMO, NR Reduced Capability (RedCap) for low-power communication, and Precious Positioning.
• The second sub-group will include brand-new technologies/capabilities that will be unique to 6G and aren’t currently available in 5G. In particular, we believe that three game-changing technologies have the potential to transform tomorrow’s networks. They are Joint Communication and Sensing (JCAS), Zero or Near-Zero Energy Communication (ZEC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML).

Let’s dive deeper into these technologies.

Joint Communication and Sensing

JCAS — also known as Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) — refers to an awareness of the physical environment around a device or base station (BS), achieved by leveraging currently deployed communication waveforms or by introducing new ones that better lend themselves to sensing and communication. Essentially, JCAS aims to map the environment using reflections of communication waveforms to gain additional dimensional awareness, thus reducing dependency on channel measurement operations and eventually dropping the dependency on technologies such as radars and lidars.

JCAS is equivalent to giving “eyes” to a device or BS, where it becomes aware of its relative proximity to physical boundaries that cause signal reflections and refractions to itself and other communication devices. The technology can even replace regular measures such as sensors and cameras for traffic monitoring.

Zero or Near Zero Energy Communication

The wireless industry has always been conscious of energy consumption from a cost and environmental perspective. As a result, it has been pushing hard to achieve energy savings with protocols such as Long-Term Evolution Machine Type Communication (LTE-M), Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and NR RedCap, all of which target lower-energy communication.

The 6G standard aims to take those efforts even further. After a signal is decoded, what happens to its energy? Can it be harvested back, similar to the way hybrid cars capture wasted energy from braking?

ZEC — or “Ambient IoT,” as 3GPP refers to it, can benefit smart connected networks and applications where, for example, sensors may be installed in locations that later become inaccessible, making it impossible to charge or replace their batteries. In addition, ZEC can facilitate dropping batteries all together and result in reducing the environmental footprint associated with producing them.

Imagine a drone hovering over a forest or bridge that locates embedded zero-energy sensors, wakes them up using 6G waveforms, commands the sensors to perform their measurements and then communicates their readings. This kind of enabling technology could pave the way to future IoT capabilities!

Given the nature of today’s communication-focused waveform design, new waveforms that lend themselves to both energy transfer and communication are needed in 6G. Moreover, contrary to the current systems, those new protocols need to have minimum overhead to reduce the communication burden on the shortly energized devices.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

The growing complexity of successive wireless technology generations has made traditional analytical models insufficient for describing system behavior. In addition, the ubiquity of smart devices and AI-empowered applications means that 6G must address the need for hyper-distributed services, intelligent service deployments and semantic communication approaches that facilitate seamless service delivery, efficient resource usage and improved quality of service.

This unprecedented level of complexity requires a paradigm shift in the various approaches to network design, deployment and operations. That’s where AI/ML can help!

AI/ML technologies have increasingly become integral to mobile communications systems and digitalization across various industries. The AI/ML techniques needed in 6G are expected to be on an entirely new level. By embracing a data-driven paradigm, where new AI capabilities are embedded into various network nodes/endpoints and interfaces from the beginning, there’s an opportunity to design 6G with pervasive intelligence capabilities.

Moreover, the adoption of an AI-native air interface — where AI/ML is primarily used to design and optimize the physical and MAC layers instead of model-driven signal processing — promises significant performance improvements and operations efficiencies. In short, AI/ML could act as the backbone for efficiently realizing multiple other key enabling technologies such as ZEC and JCAS.

This new generation of AI/ML is expected to pose multiple challenges for practical deployment. Native AI has an inherent need for robust cooperation between network infrastructure and application layers, in addition to tight integration of computing and communications layers, to eventually provide pervasive end-to-end intelligence for everyone everywhere. Therefore, it’s crucial to evaluate current 3GPP standardization process for specification development, performance evaluation and conformance testing.

Engage With CableLabs in Our 6G Efforts

CableLabs’ Technology Group is actively engaged in standards organizations such as 3GPP, IEEE, NextG Alliance, O-RAN and 6G WinnForum. Our work in these groups targets 6G research, seamless connectivity and convergence.

To get involved in shaping the next generation of wireless ecosystems, their use cases and respective technical solutions, consider participating in one or more of the various activities and industry organizations driving 6G.