Shaping Future 6G Networks. Группа авторов

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      2.3.4 Smart Transportation

The support of communications in smart transportation is threefold: infotainment, automated driving (AD), and Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C‐ITS). Infotainment (sometimes referred to as navitainment) comprises information, navigation, and entertainment services for drivers and passengers. These services are expected to evolve into extended reality (XR) experiences for passengers and enhanced high‐definition (HD) maps and real‐time information services for drivers, and industry players will need to collaborate in order to satisfy the demand for different in‐vehicle services. AD will experience a gradual increase in capabilities and market share. It is expected that up to 15% of the new vehicles sold in 2030 will have AD in designated conditions and, while the personal vehicle market is also expected to grow, trucks and delivery vehicles have a stronger business incentive compared to personal vehicles, which will drive faster deployment once technology is available [4]. AD requires high volumes of data to be exchanged between cars and the cloud for HD 3D maps, sensor sharing, and computational offloading. Those are the aspects related to individual vehicles, but the goal of C‐ITS is to improve safety and comfort by exchanging information between vehicles and the road infrastructure. Real‐time information will include not only measurements and status from sensors but also path planning and cooperative maneuvers, that are particularly relevant for unmanned aerial vehicles. An important consideration is vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians, cyclists, and road workers that can be increasingly protected with solutions based on positions and path crossing alerts enabled by the communication between smartphones (or other personal devices) and vehicles. The former aspects are mostly related to the mobility safety and experience but, in the future, other use cases such as preemptive logistics, fleet management, and telematics will expand and have a key role in society. These services are expected to be implemented by global players in the coming years and, even if they have less stringent requirements on data rate and latency, network coverage and secure private cloud platforms that leverage on network capabilities will be essential for fleet operators and vehicle manufacturers.

      While some of these functionalities can be supported in 5G networks, 6G will play a key role in increasing the flexibility to expand coverage and enable services in all locations and conditions. Continuous coverage will be key if AD should be able to rely on connectivity. Moreover, even lower latencies can enable the use of services at higher traveling speeds. Also, the expected timelines for many of these services in the mass market match the 6G expected release plans. With respect to C‐ITS requirement, data can be exchanged as collective perception messages (CPM) [5] where an average payload of 900 bytes generated at 1–10 Hz can be assumed depending on sensors, speeds, and traffic density. The download requirements will depend on the number of vehicles and other relevant user equipments (UEs) in proximity. A very important requirement will be the possibility to enable accurate positioning for moving objects, where 1 m–10 cm is the commonly referred range depending on the use case (which corresponds to 30–3 ms latencies at 120 km/h).

      In this perspective, even a significant increase in the channel capacity may not be enough to satisfy the boldest service requirements of future automotive applications. One possible solution is to realize a fully distributed user‐centric architecture in which end terminals make autonomous decisions, “disaggregated” from the network. This approach removes the burden of communication overhead to and from centralized network entities, thus achieving quasi‐real‐time latency, e.g. yielding more responsive driving decisions.

      2.3.5 Public Safety

Communications are a primary enabler of critical PS operations. First responders need to be aware of their surroundings and of the activities of the other personnel in the field. Moreover, communications are essential to deliver information and orders throughout the chain of command, i.e. between emergency operators in the incident area and the command station that is often remote. While traditionally the technologies for PS communications have focused on voice, data services can significantly improve the experience and safety of first responders. Notably, enhanced monitoring capabilities could allow a real‐time 3D rendering of the incident scenario at the command station or in head‐mounted headsets for the first responders. This can be done through video, from body cameras, or from flying platforms and with additional sensors such as lidars, 3D cameras, and thermal cameras, among others. Moreover, health and position sensors on PS operators could continuously stream telemetry data to other first responders and to the command station. Finally, the communications will not only be human‐to‐human but also extend to machine‐type traffic, to networking among vehicles (e.g. ambulances, fire trucks), and to remotely controlled devices. Remote control operations are indeed fundamental in several PS scenarios, where robots (e.g. wheelbarrow robots) are used to remotely defuse bombs, inspect incident locations, and perform operations in conditions that would be dangerous for first responders (e.g. during chemical leaks).

      Given the importance of the related scenarios and use cases, PS networking has thus been at the forefront of standardization and research efforts throughout different generations of cellular networks, with notable examples in the device‐to‐device communications and proximity services introduced in long term evolution (LTE) Release 12 [6] and the development of FirstNet using LTE technologies. Following this trend, 5G research has focused on how to improve the throughput of data services in emergency scenarios, relying on the new spectrum bands (i.e. mmWaves) and mobile communication platforms (i.e. vehicular communications and drones). As discussed in [1], however, it is not clear whether 5G technologies will be capable of delivering the improved quality of service (QoS) (e.g. the ultrahigh throughput) with the high reliability level and the ubiquitous coverage required to support PS services.

      Therefore, there is a case for further developing promising 5G innovations and bringing them to full fruition in 6G networks, focusing on reliability and coverage, with possible improvements in throughput and latency. Notably, the integration of non‐terrestrial (e.g. with satellites, balloons, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and terrestrial networks in 6G will increase the coverage of the network, allowing connectivity of a staggering 10⁷ devices per square kilometer. PS communications will also benefit from the increased throughput, to provide teleportation‐like experience between the command station and the incident site. Moreover, orchestration and remote control of robots requires end‐to‐end ultralow latency, thus pushing the over‐the‐air latency requirement into the sub‐milliseconds region and placing tight constraints on the latency budget of the rest of the network. An important requirement of PS networking is related to the sustainability and autonomy of the infrastructure, which should strive to consume as little power as possible to improve battery life in off‐grid infrastructures and mobile devices. To this end, 6G is expected to increase the energy efficiency by a factor of 10 with respect to 5G, with improvements in both the device battery lifetime and the overall network consumption.

      2.3.6 Health and Well‐being

The global increase in the cost of providing healthcare services to a continuously ageing and growing population is rapidly becoming unsustainable. In this context, 6G is positioned to foster the healthcare revolution by eliminating time and space barriers through telemedicine, achieving healthcare workflow optimizations, and guaranteeing patient access to increasingly more efficient and affordable health assistance.

      On one side, 6G connectivity solutions should enable the transition from a traditional provider–patient relationship toward a “care outside hospital” paradigm, where primary care services will be delivered by health professionals directly to the patients at home. Moving care outside clinics and health facilities will not only promote more individualized and personalized assistance but also empower preventive care while avoiding that fragile patients with limited mobility СКАЧАТЬ