Title: Opportunities and Challenges along the Road Toward 5.5G and 6G 

Abstract: As the application of 5G becomes widely spread into our daily life, ITU-R has published its Framework Recommendation towards 2030 and beyond, commonly known as the global 6G vision. Six usage scenarios and their associated capabilities are identified, including enhanced communication scenarios and beyond communication scenarios. Together with the vision, cmWave band has also been identified for further investigation, which makes possible of even higher dimension MIMO at both network and user side, bringing multi-fold capacity and spectrum efficiency gain to support immersive communication. Meanwhile, the standardization of 5.5G has been initiated since Release 18 of 3GPP, which is formally called 5G Advanced and will continue its evolution into the following Releases. Along the technology evolution, 5.5G has somehow touched all of the six scenarios defined in the 6G vision. In this talk, we will share the research progress and the opportunities and challenges along the road toward the next wave of 5.5G and the next horizon of 6G.

Bio:  Yan Chen received her B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Chu Kochen Honored College and Institute of Information and Communication Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2004 and 2009, respectively. She was a visiting researcher at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from 2008 to 2009. She joined Huawei Technologies Shanghai in 2009 and from 2010 to 2013, she was the project manager and technical leader of Huawei internal Green Radio project studying energy efficient solutions for wireless networks and also served as technical leader and manager of the Green Transmission Technology (GTT) project at GreenTouch^TM Consortium. Since 2013, she is one of the key technical leaders on 5G air interface design and the related 3GPP standardization in Huawei, focusing on multiple access including NOMA transceivers, grant-free massive access, and ultra-reliable and low-latency communications. Now she is leading the 6G vision and technology study in Huawei. Her research interests include novel 6G use cases and key capabilities such as collaborative robotics, new enabling technologies and architectures such as integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), radio network for distributed AI learning and inference, next generation multiple access (NGMA), as well as system level evaluation methodologies for new usage scenarios. She is Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicle Technology Society. She serves as guest editor of IEEE Communications Magazine and Co-Chair of the Emerging Technology Initiative (ETI) on NGMA. She won the IEEE Communication Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2017.