Gerhard P. Fettweis – Keynote Speaker

Title: 6G Research Challenges – Enabling Collaborative Personal Consumer Robotics

Abstract: 5G is enabling the beginning of the Tactile Internet for business verticals, and 6G will make this available for consumers, enabling collaborative personal mobile robotics. A vision found in the science fiction literature already 100 years ago!

We have seen the performance of cellular networks increasing over time. This is measured e.g. in increasing data rate, reduced latency, increased reliability, increased spectral efficiency, and increased capacity per area. When addressing 6G, again most white papers think along the same line, again increasing the performance of the KPIs. Does this make sense in light of what we are learning from Tactile Internet applications within the 5G Lab Germany’s nine 5G campus network testbeds? In this talk I will therefore take on a different viewpoint.

Firstly, I do not believe that increasing all KPI’s performance is unnecessary when taking today’s understanding of what we want to achieve with 6G. Secondly, we are missing some major new KPIs to address, as e.g. Trustworthiness, Resilience, and Joint Communications and Sensing,. Thirdly, e.g. requiring an increased energy efficiency of a complete network and simultaneously an increased as spectral efficiency we seem to be out of luck. Given the fact that Moore’s law has slowed down, an increased spectral efficiency in bits/s/Hz comes at the cost of requiring higher Eb/N0, doesn’t it?

Therefore this talk touches first thoughts on a differing view compared to “the current industry and sciences standard”. But we must not forget, we will need 5 more years of 5G experience to really know what 6G should look like. It is too early to judge which view is correct.

Bio: Gerhard P. Fettweis, F’09, earned a Ph.D. under H. Meyr at RWTH Aachen. After a postdoc at IBM Research, San Jose, he joined TCSI, Berkeley. Since 1994 he is Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden. Since 2018 he heads the new Barkhausen Institute. 2019 he was elected into the DFG Senate. He researches wireless transmission and chip design, coordinates 5GLab Germany, spun-out 17 tech and 3 non-tech startups, and is member of 2 German Academies: Sciences/“Leopoldina”, Engineering/“acatech”.