Samsung Electronics hosted its first-ever Samsung 6G Forum (S6GF) online. Under the theme of ‘The Next Hyper-Connected Experience for All’, the forum was divided into two sessions and was broadcasted live online via Samsung’s YouTube channel. Each session consists of talks by experts from academia and industry specializing in next-generation communications technologies, followed by a panel discussion.
“We envision that 6G will provide ultimate experiences for humans and everything through the next level of hyper-connectivity, and this idea serves as the foundation of our 6G vision,” said Sebastian Seung, President and Head of Samsung Research. “We believe that it is the right time to start preparing for 6G. Shaping 6G will require many years, as we have seen with previous generations, and will need lots of discussion and collaborations among players in industry and academia.”
The morning session was held under the theme, ‘6G Air Interface’. In this session, Jeffrey Andrews, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin gave a keynote speech, titled ‘Deep Learning in the 6G Air Interface’, highlighting that deep learning (DL) will be a key technology enabling 6G, which can provide important advances at many layers of the air interface.
Following the keynote speech, Charlie Zhang, Senior Vice President (SVP) at Samsung Research America, Takehiro Nakamura, SVP and General Manager at NTT DOCOMO and John Smee, SVP of Qualcomm Technologies gave in-depth expert talks.
SVP Charlie Zhang of Samsung Research America made a presentation on ‘Radio Technology Evolution for Beyond 5G and 6G’. He presented that while 6G technologies are still in their early days, a few emerging directions are taking shape and gaining momentum in academia and industry alike, including the support of a new spectrum such as upper mid-band in the range of 7-24 GHz and Terahertz (THz) band, novel antenna technologies, the evolution of duplex technology and network topology, spectrum sharing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a native part of the protocol design, etc.
SVP Takehiro Nakamura of NTT DOCOMO spoke on ‘5G Evolution and 6G’, highlighting the research focused on technologies and services for 5G evolution and 6G is accelerating throughout the world. SVP John Smee of Qualcomm Technologies talked about ‘Driving Air Interface Innovation Toward 6G’, emphasizing the advanced wireless research and development along multiple vectors that will bring disruptive innovations and push technology boundaries to enable new and enhanced user experiences with 6G.
Following the presentations, Juho Lee, Fellow at Samsung Research, lead a panel discussion on 6G RAN technology. Afterward, Sunghyun Choi, Executive Vice President (EVP) and Head of Advanced Communications Research Center at Samsung Research, shared Samsung’s progress in 6G research along with demo videos.
The afternoon session went under the theme, ‘Intelligent Network for 6G’. Tarik Taleb, Professor at University of Oulu, Finland, started off with a keynote speech regarding ‘6G Networking — The Journey Towards a Novel Vision of “Service of Services”’. He highlighted that AI, Network Function Virtualization, Software-Defined Networking and Edge/Cloud computing brought significant benefits in terms of reducing expenditure and operational costs, flexibility in deployment and faster time to market, and mentions that 6G will likely enable a new breeze of cloud-native mobile networking.
Following the keynote speech, Seungjoo Maeng, Master at Samsung Electronics, Byonghyo Shim, Professor at Seoul National University and Shi Jin, Professor at Southeast University, China delivered in-depth expert talks.
Master Seungjoo Maeng of Samsung Electronics talked about ‘Challenges in Applying AI/ML Technology to Improve Performance of Mobile Communication Systems’, highlighting the challenges in applying AI and ML (Machine Learning) to improve the performance of wireless mobile communication systems and how to solve them.
Professor Byonghyo Shim of Seoul National University gave a talk on ‘Deep Learning-Aided Mobile Detection and Beamforming for mmWave and THz Communications’, presenting the new paradigm to control mmWave and THz communications based on DL. Professor Shi Jin of Southeast University, China introduced ‘Deep Learning-based CSI Feedback in Massive MIMO Systems’, discussing challenges and potential research directions associated with implementing DL-based CSI (channel state information) feedback in future wireless communication systems.
After these presentations, EVP Sunghyun Choi of Samsung Research leads a panel discussion on network AI.
