Spring 2023 — Issue 1, Volume 3
This is a special issue of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³» BITS featuring articles that examine the role that information theory can play in the 6G era.
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What is Information Theory's Role in 6G?
Few technologies have been as transformative as quickly as the mobile Internet, characterized by the global 4G and 5G cellular networks, as well as pervasive WiFi. Few engineering disciplines have benefited as much from strong theoretical underpinnings as has the wireless communications field, whose origins in and continuing partnership with information theory have enabled this crowning human achievement of global real-time connectivity. As we approach 2030 and the 6G era, not to me...
Channel coding is one of the workhorses of the physical layer, enabling reliable and energy-efficient data transmission. In this article, we highlight the core innovations in channel coding that have been commercialized in wireless mobile communication standards over the past decades, in the context of current and anticipated future requirements. We point ou...
Information theory has driven the information and communication technology industry for over 70 years. Great successes have been achieved in both academia and industry. In theory, polar codes and spatially coupled low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have achieved the theoretical bound. In practice, capacity-approaching coding schemes such as turbo, polar, ...
This article puts the spotlight on the receiver front-end (RFE), an integral part of any wireless device that information theory typically idealizes into a mere addition of noise. While this idealization was sound in the past, as operating frequencies, bandwidths, and antenna counts rise, a soaring amount of power is required for the RFE to behave accordingl...
5G has expanded the traditional focus of wireless systems to embrace two new connectivity types: ultra-reliable low latency and massive communication. The technology context at the dawn of 6G is different from the past one for 5G, primarily due to the growing intelligence at the communicating nodes. This has driven the set of relevant communication problems ...
In this article, we present our vision for how extremely large aperture arrays, equipped with hundreds or thousands of antennas, can play a major role in future 6G networks by enabling a remarkable increase in data rates through spatial multiplexing of a massive number of data streams to both a single user and many simultaneous users. Specifically, with the ...
Significant progress has been made since the research community explicitly started defining a vision for 6th generation network (6G). The goal of the this article is to revisit research challenges in six key technology areas for 6G, summarize some of the main achievements so far and articulate remaining challenges. Research on new spectrum technologies mainl...