Funding entity and duration: Agencia Estatal de Investigación. Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033/, 2021-2023.
Summary of the project: The new application technologies envisioned for the next decade make that technical performance requirements of 6G must be higher than those currently achieved by 5G. Requirements of large bandwidths (to be defined, but higher than 400 MHz), high peak data rate (more than 1 Tbps), high user experience rate (on the order of 1 Gbps), density of connected devices (107 devices/km2) and user plane latency (from 25 µs to 1 ms), to mention the most representative, require technical challenges at the PHY layer, but also new improvements in the core network. To overcome these technical challenges, 6G wireless channels need to be thoroughly studied, since the knowledge of the channel is the basis for designing, optimizing and evaluating the performance of any wireless system. As in 5G, the definition of 6G once again represents a challenge in channel measurements and modelling. The introduction of new enabling technologies, e.g., very large arrays and distributed arrays, and large bandwidths require more complete and robust channel models.
Based on the starting hypothesis, the objective of the project is to develop wireless channel models and generate the channel knowledge required to the definition, standardization, and deployment of the future 6G systems. As indicated in the future vision of channel models in Section 1, important contributions are expected to be made in the three following challenges:
- Definition of a new taxonomy of radio channels.
- Inclusion of very large MIMO arrays and distributed MIMO arrays in the wireless channel model.
- Development of hybrid Quasi-Deterministic channel models.
To achieve the objective of the project, we define a methodology that combines channel measurements, channel simulations, and experimental and theoretical channel modelling.