Nokia Partners with DOCOMO and NTT on 6G Technologies

Nokia is partnering with DOCOMO and NTT to jointly define and develop key technologies for 6G. The collaboration will focus on two proofs-of-concept for emerging 6G technologies: an AI native air interface and sub-THz radio access. These aim to demonstrate a performance gain with an AI-based 6G air interface compared to a conventional air interface and to show that high-data-rate beamformed access can be achieved in a high-frequency band at 140 GHz.

Nokia and DOCOMO have a long history of research that brings new wireless technologies to life. Starting with 3G in the 1990s, to 4G, and today’s 5G including collaboration in 5G O-RAN, the companies have turned ideas into implementations and pushed boundaries to create optimized experiences for end-users. Nokia believes the 6G will not just build on existing technologies and systems but expand and transform what a network can do.

It will fuse the human, physical and digital worlds to liberate our innate human potential. To achieve it, Nokia has envisioned six key technologies that will be vital components of future 6G networks. These include new spectrum technologies, AI native air interface, network as a sensor, extreme connectivity, cognitive, automated, and specialized architectures, and security and trust.

Among the six key technology components, the initial focus of the partnership is to demonstrate the benefits of AI-based learned waveform in the transmitter with a deep learning receiver in the mid-band, as well as to test high data rate indoor communications in the sub-THz band. These technologies have the potential to substantially improve deployment flexibility and increase network throughput beyond that of 5G in the respective spectrum bands without necessarily increasing energy consumption.

Providing high-rate access will be important in enabling enhanced and new use cases in the 6G era, such as multi-modal mixed-reality telepresence and remote collaboration, massive twinning, and collaborating robots. The plan is to set up environments for experiments and demonstrations in DOCOMO and NTT premises in Japan and Nokia premises in Stuttgart, Germany, and to begin performing the desired tests and measurements in 2022.

“We envision that 6G will unify the human experience across the digital, physical and human worlds. We build on a long tradition of collaborations between the world-leading labs at DOCOMO and Nokia Bell Labs. Nokia is very honored to engage in this collaboration with DOCOMO and NTT, as global leading operators that are always among the first to bring new generations to the market. We look forward to working together and validating key concepts and key technologies to realize the 6G vision,“ said Peter Vetter, President of Bell Labs Core Research at Nokia.