6G New Radio for Internet of Everything: Bridging the Physical and Digital Worlds

It is common knowledge that the concept Digital Twin is the backbone of the ongoing fourth industrial revolution. It revolves around the idea of building digital replicas of living or non-living physical assets and their dynamics, which can be the movement of electrons in a circuit, the mechanical movement of an object or the function of a living organ. The idea first arose at NASA in 2002, where they created a full-scale mock-ups of space capsule. However, the concept takes off when the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has made the task of sensing and collecting date more affordable and accessible. The 5G and beyond cellular systems hence will play an integral role in enabling the digital twin technology as it will be the communication bridge between the digital and physical world. Providing radio access to millions of IoT devices (i.e., radio access for everything) comes however with heavy requirements, in terms of latency, connectivity, communication security, network management and transmission rate.

The attempts made in developing the 5G New Radio (NR) result in costly and moderate performance solutions. Cost efficiency and feasibility are the central of 6G NR business models. Although 6G NR is anticipated to enhance the system capacity by large, no new enabling technologies have come to light so far. Therefore, developing out of the box solutions is definitely a must. My research aim is to contribute to developing feasible and cost-effective 5G/6G New Radio, with emphasis on leveraging machine learning and communication/information/networking theories. My recent research focuses on optimizing the use of the radio resources (e.g., power and frequency) and the radio equipment (e.g., base-station), and reducing the cost of radio equipment management. In the first part of the talk, I will demonstrate how to provide ultra-high connectivity at the cost of small degradation on the rate per user. In the second part, I will explain how to cope with main issues related to mmWave communications including the problem of fast channel variation. In the third part, I will give insight about new research directions that are promising for enabling  the 6G NR.