6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Contents
1 Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 3

2 6G services ..................................................................................................................... 3

2.1 From 5G services to 6G services ................................................................................. 3

2.2 6G service use cases .................................................................................................... 7

3 6G capabilities ............................................................................................................... 8

3.1 6G performance indicators .......................................................................................... 9

3.2 6G efficiency indicators ............................................................................................ 15

3.3 6G usage scenarios .................................................................................................... 17

4 6G enabling technologies ............................................................................................. 18

4.1 System functional framework.................................................................................... 19

4.2 Convergence of mobile network and computing ....................................................... 20

4.3 Integrated sensing and communication ..................................................................... 23

4.4 AI-native system ........................................................................................................ 28

4.5 Data function and data plane ..................................................................................... 35

4.6 Extremely low power communication ....................................................................... 37

4.7 MIMO evolution........................................................................................................ 44

4.8 Reconfigurable intelligent surface ............................................................................. 46

4.9 Delay-Doppler domain waveforms ........................................................................... 50

4.10 Other technologies ................................................................................................... 54

5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 55

References ........................................................................................................................... 57

Abbreviations ...................................................................................................................... 61

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paper.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

1 Abstract

In October 2020, vivo Communications Research Institute (vCRI) released two 6G

whitepapers [1,2], and proposed a 6G vision for a freely connected physical and digital
integrated world. The first whitepaper, “Digital Life 2030+”, depicts, through many
concrete use cases, a better scenario of digital life for the 6G era in 2030 and beyond.
The second whitepaper, “6G Vision, Requirements and Challenges”, provides a
preliminary analysis of the technical vision, requirements and challenges for 6G system.

In the past two years, the industry is gradually forming a consensus on 6G services
and key capability indicators; the research and development of 6G key enabling
technologies is progressing. vCRI, together with our partners, has conducted numerous
analysis and research of 6G business models, drivers, and application scenarios. vCRI
has also been involved in research, evaluation and technical experiments on 6G system
architecture and enabling technologies. This white paper presents the latest research
findings and preliminary views on 6G services, capabilities, architecture and key
technologies. It is expected that this white paper will contribute to the development of
6G technologies.

2 6G services

2.1 From 5G services to 6G services

From 1G to 4G, mobile communication system has evolved around the

transmission of information, with the main goal of larger communication capacity,
higher data rate and lower latency, a new generation every decade.

5G supports three usage scenarios, i.e., eMBB (Enhanced Mobile Broadband),

URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications) and mMTC (Massive
Machine Type Communication). 5G expands mobile communications from the human-
oriented market to the Internet of Things and industrial applications. 5G provides basic
telecommunication services such as short message service (SMS), voice over IP
multimedia subsystem (VoIMS), with further enhancements to support next generation
real time communication (NG-RTC); 5G provides on-demand mobile data connection
with different QoS through control plane (CP) and user plane (UP) functions; 5G
provides services such as UE positioning and network information to third-party
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

applications by means of NEF (Network Exposure Function) or common API

(Application Program Interface) frameworks; and 5G provides edge computing
services realized by means of the deployment of multi-access edge computing (MEC).
In summary, 5G supports high-performance communication services for individuals
and industries, and information services such as UE positioning and network
information exposure, and 5G supports computing services through the deployment of
MEC.

Towards 2030+, people will pursue a better digital life, the digital upgrade of
industry will greatly improve production efficiency, and digital social management will
bring us a more harmonious and beautiful social environment. What services will 6G
offer?

The technical requirements of the 29 cases of life scenarios described in the

whitepaper “Digital Life 2030+” can be summarized in three areas: on-demand
connectivity everywhere, ubiquitous and sophisticated digitalization, and pervasive
intelligence. The white paper, “6G vision, requirements and challenges”, presented the
6G vision of a "freely connected physical-digital integrated world. Towards 2030 and
beyond, 6G will build a ubiquitous digital world, enabling free connection between the
physical world and the digital world to realize the tight integration of the two worlds.
It will provide rich business applications to make an easy and happy digital life, and
promote an efficient and sustainable development of society.

Realizing a freely connected physical-digital integrated world requires ubiquitous

sensing and information capturing capabilities to achieve accurate real-time digital
acquisition of the physical world, ubiquitous connectivity and converged computing
(including computing, storage, and intelligence) capabilities to build a digital world,
and strong communication capabilities to achieve free connection between the physical
and digital worlds to support digital applications in a wide range of industries.
Therefore, communication, information and computing are the three most important
fundamental capabilities for building a freely connected physical and digital world. 6G
will natively support communication, information and computing services, and will
serve as the network information cornerstone to support the efficient and sustainable
development of future society.

As shown in Figure 1, super communication, basic information, and converged

 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

computing will be the three services offered by 6G system. Systems and technologies
of communication, information and computing, together with new materials, new
terminals, intelligent human-computer interaction, integrated circuits and other
technologies, will build a freely connected physical-digital integrated world which
supports digital life, digital governance and digital production in 2030+.

Figure 1. 6G builds a freely connected physical digital integrated world

Super communication service

From its inception, cellular mobile communications were designed to provide

seamless communication and connectivity in wireless mobile scenarios. 6G will
continue this historic mission and provide super communication service. On the one
hand, basic telecommunication services of 6G will support new services such as
immersive extended reality (XR), holographic telepresence, and multi-sensory
interconnection [3~6], in addition to 5G rich media voice, video, and SMS. On the other
hand, 6G mobile data connection services will continue to improve in capacity, data
rate, latency, reliability and many other aspects, broadening the range of users and
increasing the value of services, with more end-to-end flexibility and adaptability to
meet the needs of individuals and industries in more application scenarios. At the same
time, 6G will further expand geospatial coverage, lower the access barrier of terminals,
improve the accessibility of connections, expand the number of subscribers, and realize
the free connection and information transmission between the physical and digital
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

worlds.

Basic information service

6G terminal or base station equipment transmits radio waves for communication,

and meanwhile can measure the received signals for wireless sensing. Thus, the
information of the radio propagation environment and the target objects can be obtained,
such as location, speed, direction, material, or imaging, supporting rich sensing
applications and scenarios. In addition, as a ubiquitously connected system, 6G will
generate a large amount of valuable basic data information when supporting the
connection between the physical and digital worlds. Compared with 5G that provides
limited information services on UE positioning and network information provision, 6G
is expected to provide comprehensive wireless sensing and positioning services, and
further enhance network information provision. In addition, 6G can collect public
information of industries such as sensor data and GIS (Geographic Information System)
information, to empower all walks of life. This can avoid the duplicated collection of
the information by different industry applications. In summary, 6G basic information
services include wireless sensing, enhanced network information provision, and public
information of industries.

Converged computing service

Computing power is the new productivity in the digital economy. It includes

multidimensional resources such as networking, computing and storage. In a digital
system based on 5G, the computations required for application services are typically
performed at the terminal and in the cloud. 5G system merely provides link between
terminals and cloud servers to assist the completion of computing tasks. However, many
new use cases such as immersive XR, interactive 3D virtual digital human,
collaborative robots, automated driving, and multi-sensory interconnection [3~6] will
appear in the 6G era. The computing capabilities, such as computing power, storage,
and intelligence, at the terminal is not enough to support these new use cases. The
latency at the cloud side cannot meet the demands of the new use cases due to the
distance. Although deployment of MEC in 5G networks can meet the needs of some
use cases, the convergence of computing and network is not enough. Through the
convergence of mobile network and computing, 6G will have natively converged the
computing capability [7] and can provide converged the computing services including
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

AI (Artificial Intelligence), therefore enabling highly integrated physical and digital

worlds.

2.2 6G service use cases

As mentioned earlier, 6G will provide three services including super

communication, basic information, and converged computing. Based on one or more
services, a variety of service use cases will be generated by considering several
elements such as service users, service locations, service requirements, etc. For 2030+,
more service use cases will involve two or three services, such as communication and
information services, communication and computing services, and communication,
information and computing services. Automated driving is a complex service use case
that simultaneously requires communication, information, and computing services. A
diagram of 6G services and service use cases is given in Figure

Figure 2. 6G services and service use cases

As the future social network information cornerstone, commercially, the main body
of 6G services is 6G operators. The users of 6G services include the connected mobile
subscribers and OTT (Over The Top) service providers in thousands of industries. The
content of 6G services include three basic services, i.e., super communication, basic
information and converged computing, as well as a variety of service use cases derived
from the three basic services. Operators provide various services and create value for
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

different customers, through the network infrastructure and terminals in 6G system,

constituting the fundamental business logic of 6G service system design.

Figure 3. 6G services systems

3 6G capabilities

6G natively supports communications, information, computing, and related

integrated services. To support 6G technology selection and system design which
enable these services, 6G capabilities need to be defined, which include performance
indicators and efficiency indicators. 6G performance indicators refer to the reachable
performance of 6G services, which directly affects the service experience of the users.
6G efficiency indicators reflect the cost and efficiency of the provision of 6G services.
Defining reasonable 6G efficiency indicators is a prerequisite to ensure sustainable 6G
network. As shown in Figure 4, 6G performance indicators include communication
performance, information performance and computing performance; 6G efficiency
indicators include spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, cost efficiency, etc.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Figure 4. 6G performance indicators and efficiency indicators

3.1 6G performance indicators

3.1.1 Performance indicators of super communication

In order to define 6G communication performance indicators, the similar approach

can be followed as in 5G communication performance indicators [8,9], but demanding
much higher requirements compared to 5G. To support advanced service use cases such
as holographic telepresence, intelligent interaction, immersive XR, real-time remote
control, and intelligent connection of all things, 6G data rate (including peak data rate
and user experience rate), communication latency and area traffic capacity and other
performance indicators are several times or even order of magnitude higher than that in
5G [2,4,10]. The definitions and suggested values for the 6G communication
performance indicators are given in Table 1.

Table 1. Comparison of communication performance indicators between 5G and 6G

Communication
5G 6G
performance Definition
requirements requirements
indicators
Peak data rate Maximum data rate achievable 20 Gbps >100 Gbps
per user/device under ideal
conditions
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

User Achievable data rates for 0.1-1 Gbps >1 Gbps

experienced data mobile users/devices in the
rate target coverage area
Communication Time span from sending 1 ms 0.1 ms
latency packets at the source to
receiving them at the
destination
Area traffic Total traffic throughput 10 Mbit/s/m2 1Gbit/s/m2
capacity provided per unit geographic
area
Connection The total number of connected 1/m2 10-100/m2
density and/or accessible devices per
unit area
Mobility The maximum relative speed 500 km/h 1000 km/h
between the transmitter and
receiver when meeting certain
QoS
Reliability Probability of success in 0.99999 0.9999999
transmitting a fixed size packet
within the specified maximum
time
Timing accuracy Time synchronization accuracy Microsecond Nanosecond
between devices level level

In addition to the above quantifiable performance indicators, coverage is also a

very important system performance indicator. On the one hand, 6G will support the full
coverage of space, air, ground and sea through the technologies of satellite
communication and high-altitude platforms. On the other hand, 6G will further extend
the terminal access range, integrate technologies such as backscatter communication,
support very low power terminal communication, and improve the performance of near-
field scenarios such as body area networks.

3.1.2 Performance indicators of basic information

6G basic information services include wireless sensing, enhanced network

 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

information provision, and public information of industries, of which the performance

indicators are divergent.

Performance indicators of sensing

6G will support object and environment sensing, as well as UE positioning which

is also supported by 5G. Without loss of generality, the key performance indicators for
6G sensing services are defined in Table 2, with the reference to the definitions in the
field of radar sensing.

Table 2. Sensing performance indicators

Sensing performance
Definition
indicators
Sensing accuracy Sensing accuracy refers to the degree of deviation between
the true results and the sensing results at a certain
confidence level, which can be characterized by the
sensing error, e.g., root mean square error. The smaller the
sensing error, the higher the sensing accuracy. Sensing
accuracy includes distance accuracy, velocity accuracy,
angle accuracy, etc.
Sensing resolution Sensing resolution refers to the ability to distinguish
multiple sensing targets in different dimensions, including
distance resolution, velocity resolution, angular resolution,
etc.
Sensing range Sensing range refers to the valid range of certain sensing
parameters under the premise of satisfying certain sensing
indexes, including sensing distance range, sensing speed
range, sensing angle range, etc.
Sensing latency Sensing latency is used to quantitatively describe the real-
time requirements of a sensing service, such as the
maximum latency from the generation of a sensing service
request to the feedback of the sensing result.
Sensing update rate The sensing update rate is the inverse of the time interval
between two adjacent sensing results.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

6G sensing performance depends on the frequency band, the system bandwidth,

the structures of transmitter and receiver, the number of antennas, and the accuracy of
transceiver synchronization of the 6G integrated sensing and communications systems.
Table 3 gives the sensing performance indicators for two system configurations. The
measurements are based on the radar SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) calculation method
and the sensing accuracy calculation method [11].

Table 3. Sense performance indicators for two system configurations

system system
configuration 1 configuration 2
Central frequency 6 GHz 30 GHz
Bandwidth 400 MHz 2 GHz
Number of antenna 256 /8 dBi 512 /8 dBi
elements/element
gain
System parameters Transmitting power 55 dBm 40 dBm
of BS
Inter-site distance 500 m 200 m
Reference RCS 0.1 m2 0.1 m2
Target maximum 120 km/h 120 km/h
velocity
Coherent processing 5 ms 1 ms
interval
Sensing performance Distance resolution 0.375 m 0.075 m
at cell edge Velocity resolution 5 m/s 5 m/s
Angular resolution 7.2°/7.2° 3.6°/7.2°
(azimuth /zenith)
Distance accuracy ～0.1 m ～0.1 m
Velocity accuracy ～1 m/s ～7 m/s
Angular accuracy ～2°/2° ～5°/10°
(azimuth /zenith)
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Other performance indicators of basic information

In addition to wireless sensing, 6G basic information services include the enhanced

network information provision and public information of industries, and their potential
performance indicators include availability, responsiveness, etc.

3.1.3 Performance indicators of converged computing

6G will support converged computing services such as computing offloading, in-

network computing, AI services, etc. The performance of AI services [12~15] includes
achievable performance (e.g., AI performance such as normalized mean square error,
cosine similarity, etc., and communication performance such as data rate, coverage,
block error rate, etc.), AI model complexity, convergence speed (or training time),
generalization capability, data dependency, inference time, computational resource
overhead for training, transmission resource overhead for model transfer, and storage
overhead. The performance of AI services depends mainly on the development of
computing technologies such as AI algorithms and big data technologies in 2030 and
beyond.

6G computing performance indicators should be determined by the resources and

performance of both computing and communication deployed in 6G system. When we
define system-level and user-level performance indicators of 6G computing services, it
is necessary to consider the typical service use cases of computing, and the related user
density and business model, etc.

Interactive 3D virtual digital humans are expected to be one of the prevalent

applications in the 2030+ metaverse era [16]. We assume that the target number of
geometries (triangles or faces) of the future high-precision and intelligent interactive
virtual digital human is more than 500,000. The preliminary evaluation shows that the
computing capacity required by the driving and rendering of the 3D virtual digital
human may be no less than 10 Tera FLOPS (floating-point operations per second). Most
smartphones cannot meet such a high computing demand. Meanwhile, the real-time
interactive experience between the digital human and the real human requires that the
total round-trip time delay does not exceed 200 ms. It can be predicted that the
computing latency requirement should be between 10 ms to 100 ms, excluding other
latency (e.g., transmission latency). The rendering deployed in a centralized cloud can
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

hardly meet the above delay requirement. The low-latency and high-capacity
computing services required by the interactive 3D virtual digital human can be provided
by 6G system. We assume that the density of active users is one person per 5 m2; the
average time per person per day using the virtual digital human application is 30
minutes; the concentration rate (the ratio of the volume of computing in the busiest hour
to the volume of computing throughout the day) is 10%; and the cell coverage area is
10,000 m2. Taking these assumptions as an example, the performance indicators
required by the 3D virtual digital human scenario are shown in Table 4. Due to the
diversity of computing use cases, the operator's 6G computing capacity needs to be
planned and deployed according to the corresponding requirements.

Table 4. The performance indicators of computing services

Requirements
Performance indicators of
based on virtual
converged computing Definition
digital human use
services
cases
System-level Computing The amount of computing ~100000 Tera
performance power density power that can be delivered FLOPS/km2
indicators per coverage unit area of
mobile communication
network
Connection The number of computing ~10000 / km2
density for service connections that
computing can be provided per
coverage unit area of
mobile communication
network
User-level Peak The available peak ~10 Tera FLOPS
performance computing computing power for a
indicators power single user
Computing The total latency from the 10 ms – 100 ms
latency time a user initiates a
request for a computing
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

service to the time a

computing response is
received

3.2 6G efficiency indicators

Efficiency indicators of communication services usually include spectral efficiency,

energy efficiency and cost efficiency, which can be basically reused to wireless sensing
services belonging to information services. The computing services do not involve the
use of radio waves, so spectral efficiency is not involved. The definitions and
requirements of efficiency indicators for communication, sensing and computing are
given in Table 5.

Table 5. 6G efficiency indicators

6G
Communication Computing
efficiency Sensing indicators
indicators indicators
indicators

Spectral Definition: throughput The time and N/A

efficiency provided per cell per frequency resources
frequency resource required to complete
one sensing task
6G requirements: 2-3
times higher than 5G

Energy Definition: number of Energy required to Number of

efficiency bits that can be complete one sensing operations
transmitted per unit of task available per unit
energy, or the amount of of energy
energy required to
transmit 1 bit

6G requirements:

More than 100 times

improvement in network
energy efficiency
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

compared to 5G.

10 to 100 times
improvement in terminal
energy efficiency
compared to 5G.

Cost Definition: the number Cost to complete one Number of

efficiency of bits that can be sensing task operations
transmitted per unit cost, available per unit
or the cost required to cost
transmit 1 bit.

6G requirements: more
than 100 times
improvement compared
to 5G

In addition to the above quantitative efficiency indicators, 6G efficiency indicators

includes the following aspects.

 Flexibility: 6G system shall be easily deployed and maintained. 6G system

shall support adaptation and tailoring of system functions to enable new use
cases and new business opportunities, and support smooth evolution from 5G
to 6G.

 Intelligence: AI-based network management and O&M, and programmable 6G

system which achieves flexible and efficient management of network
resources shall be supported.

 Green: In addition to supporting higher energy efficiency indicators compared

to 5G, 6G can support the use of renewable energy to ensure the sustainability
of the network; 6G will also support extremely low power communication
through ambient energy supply and other means, so as to greatly enhance
connectivity accessibility and support the Internet of Everything.

 Resilience: 6G system can quickly and autonomously detect and identify

network anomalies, equipment failures, operational errors and network attacks,
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

and then self-recover and self-cure to guarantee the availability and robustness
of the network and services.

 Security, privacy and trustworthiness: 6G needs to meet the needs of

trustworthiness, security and privacy when providing communication,
information and computing services, as well as the related service use cases.
For example, basic information services need to observe local laws and
regulations, ensure the security of data and information, and protect user
privacy. Converged computing needs to consider computing security, storage
security, data privacy, algorithm privacy, etc.

3.3 6G usage scenarios

Six communication performance indicators, i.e., data rate, mobility, latency,

reliability, area traffic capacity and connection density, and information-based
performance indicators and computation-based performance indicators, are considered
in Figure 5. The three basic services, i.e., super communication, basic information and
converged computing, are associated to the above indicators according to the
importance of performance indicators (high, medium or low). Among them, super
communication is further divided into three sub-scenarios, i.e., eMBB 2.0, URLLC 2.0
and mMTC 2.0. Given the diversity of 6G service use cases and the scalability of 6G
system, in addition to the five usage scenarios mentioned above, 6G will further support
more flexible scenarios based on super communications, basic information and
converged computing services within the capability boundaries.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Figure 5. 6G usage scenarios

4 6G enabling technologies

As mentioned earlier, 6G will support higher capabilities and service expansion

compared to 5G. Table 6 summarizes the different characteristics of 5G services and
6G services.

Table 6. 5G services and 6G services

Service type 5G services 6G services

Communication Basic Basic telecom XR, holographic telepresence,

telecom services, VoNR, multi-sensory interconnection,
business new voice, 5G etc.
messaging, etc.

Data On-demand Higher-performance on-

connection mobile data demand mobile data
connectivity connectivity

Information UE positioning, Natively support basic

some network information service including
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

information wireless sensing, enhanced

network information provision,
and public information of
industries

Computing MEC Natively support converged

computing services including
computing power, storage, AI,
etc.

To support 6G services and capabilities, as shown in Figure 6, on the one hand,

the system functional framework for 6G needs to be designed to support a wide variety
of 6G service use cases. On the other hand, the key enabling technologies need to be
studied to meet the various performance and efficiency indicators of the 6G system.

Figure 6. Logic diagram of 6G services, capabilities and enabling technologies

4.1 System functional framework

5G provides main communication services including VoIMS, SMS and NG-RTC,

and provides positioning services based on location management function (LMF). The
computing services provided by the external central cloud or MEC are related to the
application data carried by 5G, which are beyond the scope of 5G system. 6G will
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

enhance the existing communication services and IMS communication services, and
further meet the transmission requirements of new use cases such as immersive XR,
holographic telepresence, multi-sensory interconnection, etc. Moreover, the services
offered by 6G will also be further enriched with the addition of basic information
services, converged computing services.

As shown in Figure 7, corresponding to 6G services, the existing communication

functions, such as access management, mobility management, session management,
policy control, and UP (User Plane) data transmission, need enhancement. Meanwhile,
the new network functions, such as sensing function, computing function and data
function, need to be introduced to achieve integration of sensing and communication,
convergence of mobile network and computing, cross-domain data interaction and AI-
native system. From the perspective of resource set, 6G will expand the computing
resources and storage resources required for computing services, and further expand
spectrum resources and wired network resources for all the three services. 6G will
support real-time management and scheduling of all the resources to meet the needs of
system flexibility.

Figure 7. 6G system functional framework

4.2 Convergence of mobile network and computing

The convergence of mobile network and computing focuses on the convergence of

communication function and computing function in 6G system to provide computing
services for users with computing requirements, where the computing services include
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

both non-AI computing and AI computing. 6G system will better support computing
data transmission by coordinating computing latency and transmission latency
dynamically. Due to the distributed nature of 6G network function nodes, the widely
distributed nodes of integrated communication and computing can shorten the latency
of computing data transmission and reduce the load of the backbone network.

For wireless communication networks, the potential protocol impact of 6G

computing services may be at IMS service layer, at network function layer of core
network, at network function layer of RAN, etc. For wired network, to achieve a better
match between computing and wired transport, the transport protocols are enhanced to
support the real time interaction of routing information, computing status information
and application information. The transport protocols include Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) Compute First Networking (CFN), Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6),
Application-aware IPv6 Networking (APN6), etc. Besides, the collaboration between
wireless communication networks and wired network to support end-to-end dynamic
adaptation between connection and computing is another valuable research direction.

Figure 8. Network architecture diagram on the convergence of mobile network

and computing
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

The computing function in 6G system can provide computing offloading for UE，
and also provide in-network computing. In-network computing refers to simultaneous
computing services for data during data transmission between application function and
UE, as well as between UEs. As shown in Figure 8, UE can select the appropriate
computing node and obtain computing services through 6G system. The typical
converged computing service flows are described as follows.

 UE requests 6G network computing power from the network computing function,

and the network computing function sends the computing results to UE.

 The application function or UE requests 6G network computing power from the

network computing function, and the network computing function sends the
computing result to UE or application function.

 UE requests external computing power and obtains computing results, where 6G

system collaborates with the external cloud function to dynamically adjust the
required transmission performance and computing nodes, etc.

Key technologies of convergence of mobile network and computing are described

as follows.

 Metrics and awareness of computing service/resources. Metrics of computing

service/resources are the fundamental issues. Uniform metrics based on multiple
dimensions including computing, storage and networking can provide uniform
rules for status sensing, control, management and charging of computing
service/resource. Awareness of computing service/resources, i.e., real-time
awareness of computing service/resources status of 6G internal or external
computing nodes, can support a fast selection of computing node for the computing
service and guarantee QoE.

 Control and management of computing services. Based on the computing

requirements, 6G system needs to determine whether to divide computational task
into sub-tasks, and request and negotiate computing resources for the sub-tasks.

 Control and management of computing bearer. The computing bearer provides the
transmission channel for computing data interaction, to meet the demand of both
communication QoS and computing QoS. The control and management of
computing bearer include the creation, modification, deletion and QoS
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

management of computing bearer.

4.3 Integrated sensing and communication

Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) is a key 6G enabling technology

to provide basic information services. Typical use cases and application scenarios for
ISAC are listed in Table 7. It is worth noting that the channel environment related
information obtained through sensing can also be used to assist the communication
system in channel estimation, beam management, etc., and enhance the performance of
the communication system [17].

Table 7. Typical use cases and application scenarios for ISAC

Category of
ISAC use Use cases Application scenarios
cases

Coarse- Weather conditions monitoring, air Meteorology, agriculture, daily

grained quality monitoring life services
sensing
Flow detection and quantity Intelligent transportation,
statistics for traffic and pedestrian, security monitoring
intrusion detection

Localization, tracking, and Application scenarios of radar

range/speed/angle measurement
for target object

Environment mapping Smart driving and navigation

for car and UAV (Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle), smart city

Fine-grained Motion/pose/face recognition Intelligent interaction, gaming,

sensing smart home
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Vital signs monitoring (Heartbeat Health care, medical care

respiration, etc.)

Imaging, material detection, Security inspection, industry,

composition analysis biomedicine

To design a unified framework for sensing measurement and report for a variety of
sensing scenarios and use cases, three levels of sensing information are defined in Table
8.

Table 8. Three levels of sensing information

Level for
Sensing
sensing Content
information
information
Received signal Complex result of received signal or channel
1 or raw channel response, amplitude/phase, I /Q components and
information the related arithmetic results
Sensing Delay, Doppler, angle, strength, and their
2
measurements multidimensional combinations
Presence or absence of target, distance, velocity,
orientation, acceleration, position, trajectory,
3 Sensing results movement, expression, respiration rate/heart
rate, imaging results, weather, air quality,
material and composition, etc.

ISAC use cases and application scenarios bring new requirements on the system
functional framework design. ISAC system needs to support sensing service request
reception, sensing quality of service (QoS) assurance, sensing control and air interface
sensing, as well as generating sensing results and sensing service request responses
based on the sensing measurements.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Figure 9. Functional framework of integrated sensing and communication system

The definition of sensing QoS can be referred to the definition of sensing service
performance indicators in Chapter 3. The sensing control mainly includes:

1) Configuring sensing signals according to the sensing service request or sensing

QoS. Sensing signals could be reference signals, synchronization signals, data signals,
etc. The sensing signal configuration includes time, frequency and space resource
configuration of the sensing signals, etc.

2) Determining the required sensing measurement quantity and measurement

configuration for the sensing service request. The measurement quantity could be layer
1 or layer 2 sensing information shown in Table 8. The measurement configuration
includes the indication of the sensing signals to be measured and the transmission
format of the sensing measurement quantity, etc.

3) Determining the sensing transmitter(s) and sensing receiver(s), i.e., network

equipment (e.g., BS), UE, etc. Different sensing transmitter(s) and sensing receiver(s)
constitute different sensing methods, including Uu based sensing (3 and 4 in Figure 9),
sidelink based sensing (6 in Figure 9), BS/UE monostatic sensing (1 and 5 in Figure 9),
and inter-BS bistatic sensing (2 in Figure 9).

In addition to the above sensing functions, sensing capability registration and

interaction, sensing security and privacy, and sensing billing are also important
functions for ISAC system.

The key air interface technologies for ISAC system include waveform design,
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

multi-antenna sensing technologies, sensing algorithm design, interference cancellation,

etc.

 Waveform design. Waveform design is the key technology of ISAC, which could
be communication-waveform-based design, sensing-waveform-based design, and
new waveform design. Communication waveforms include OFDM (Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing), SC-FDE (Single Carrier Frequency Domain
Equalization), OTFS (Orthogonal Time Frequency Shift), etc. Communication-
waveform-based design is to implement sensing functions while ensure the
efficiency of communication information transmission. Sensing waveforms
include FMCW (Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave), etc. Sensing-
waveform-based design is to embed communication information while ensure the
performance of sensing parameter estimation. New waveform design, which is still
at the early stage of research, requires trade-offs between communication
performance and sensing performance. The selection of waveform parameters can
be based on the integrated performance metrics of communication and sensing to
achieve the optimal overall performance.

 Multi-antenna technologies. ISAC systems need to support multi-antenna

technologies in order to improve both communication performance and sensing
performance. Take phased-array radar and MIMO radar as examples, the former
uses the entire antenna array for beamforming and can form a narrow beam with
high gain and high directivity, while the latter uses waveform diversity and virtual
array features to obtain higher detection/estimation resolution, higher maximum
identifiable target number, and better clutter rejection compared to phased-array
radar with the same aperture [18]. The design of massive MIMO hardware
architecture and antenna arrays, the design of precoding/beamforming schemes, etc.
are important research directions of ISAC.

 Sensing algorithm design. Different from communication systems, sensing systems

usually use unmodulated transmit signals and use parameter estimation algorithms
e.g. periodogram, MUSIC (Multiple Signal Classification), ESPRIT (Estimation of
Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques), and compressed sensing
to obtain specific information including amplitude, angle, Doppler, and delay of
the channel. The ISAC receiver needs to select the appropriate processing
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

algorithm according to the division of communication and sensing functions and

their influence on each other.

 Interference cancellation. Interference in communication systems mainly includes

inter-cell interference and intra-cell multi-user interference. The interference in
sensing system includes the clutter interference caused by non-sensing targets in
addition to the interference in communication system. In particular, for monostatic
sensing, there is also self-interference of transceiver, which requires effective
isolation between transmitter and receiver, or self-interference cancelation. For
ISAC systems, in addition to the above-mentioned interference, potential
interference between communication signals and sensing signals also needs to be
considered. An advanced interference management and suppression scheme is the
key to ensure the performance of ISAC system.

To realize the application of ISAC, in addition to the research needed on the above-
mentioned key technologies, there are still the following challenges to be solved:

 Performance balance and joint optimization of communication and sensing.

Determining the joint performance metrics of communication and sensing in
different scenarios and solving the trade-off between communication data rate and
sensing accuracy from the theoretical aspect are of great significance for the design,
evaluation and optimization of ISAC.

 Channel measurement and channel modeling for ISAC. Communication channel

models cannot be directly used for ISAC scenarios. First, communication channel
models cannot distinguish between sensing targets and non-sensing targets, and
channel modeling for ISAC scenarios requires at least some level of deterministic
modeling of multipath/multipath clusters of the sensing targets and clutter. In
addition, the communication channel model does not support self-transmitting and
self-receiving. For monostatic sensing, the reflection and scattering characteristics
of the sensed target need to be considered in the channel model. The channel
experienced by the echo signal has twice the path loss compared to the
communication channel, and has additional reflection loss (related to the RCS of
the sensed object).

 Impact of non-ideal factors on sensing performance. Extracting accurate CSI

(Channel State Information) by detecting the sensing signal is the key to meet the
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

sensing performance, and some non-ideal factors can lead to CSI measurement
errors. The hardware non-ideal factors that affect the sensing performance mainly
include:

◼ Uncertainty in power of the received signal. The actual gain adjustment

differs from the expected one due to the non-idealities of Low Noise
Amplifier (LNA), Programmable Gain Amplifier (PGA), etc. This affects
the estimated CSI amplitude [19].

◼ I/Q imbalance. Due to the limitation of device performance, the phase

difference of the I and Q branches of the local oscillator signals cannot be
guaranteed to be exactly 90°, the amplitude of the I and Q branches is
different, and there is a DC (Direct Current) offset. All the above will
affect the orthogonality of the baseband signal.

◼ Non-ideal clock. Clock deviation at the transmitter and receiver brings

Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO), Sampling Frequency Offset (SFO),
Symbol Timing Offset (STO), etc. In addition, the noise introduced by the
nonlinear oscillator brings random phase noise to the output carrier, and
these factors affect the accuracy of parameters estimation such as speed
and distance estimation.

4.4 AI-native system

In recent years, AI has achieved great success in several fields such as image
recognition and natural language processing in the computer field, and motion control
and trajectory planning in the robotics field. If AI is applied to communication systems,
it is necessary to combine the requirements of communication systems and the
advantages of AI technology to unlock specific use cases. AI can be used to solve the
following three types of problems in 6G communication systems:

1) Problems that cannot be accurately modeled. For example, the impact of power
amplifiers on the signal, the nonlinear impact of the actual channel and noise (colored
and colorless) on the signal. In this aspect, AI can extract the features from a large
amount of wireless communication data to complete modeling of complex problems
more accurately.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

2) Problems in communication systems for which closed-form solutions are

difficult to obtain or not available. For example, the problems could be channel
variation with time and frequency, UE trajectory prediction, traffic prediction, wireless
resource allocation, multi-user pairing, coverage optimization, capacity optimization,
and other nonlinear problems and nonconvex problems. In this aspect, AI can
summarize the hidden relationship between input and output through a data-driven
approach, and directly provide the corresponding solution or approximate solution.

3) Joint optimization problems of multiple functional modules. For example, cross-

layer optimization, joint optimization of multiple MIMO-related signal processing
modules, joint source and channel coding, joint design of equalization and decoding,
etc. In this aspect, AI can model multiple related functional modules as a neural network
and convert the complex multi-module joint problem into a simple data fitting or
regression problem.

We believe, 6G will be an AI-native system where the network entities i.e.,

Network Management System (NMS), Core Network (CN), BS and UE, have AI
resources and capabilities, and collaborate with each other to realize AI-related
scenarios and use cases together with the 6G functions, e.g., user plane and control
plane functions. Figure 10 shows an AI-native architecture with the following
characteristics.

• All four types of network entities, i.e., NMS, CN, BS and UE, have basic AI
functions and AI resources (computation, storage, etc.)

• AI resources enable Data Management Functions (DMF), Model Management

Functions (MMF) and control functions.

◼ DMF include data collection, data pre-processing, data labeling, sample library,
etc.

◼ MMF include basic model repository, model training, model transfer, model
inference, model activation and de-activation, model monitoring, model
updating, etc.

◼ The control function refers to the policy and parameter configuration of the
DMF and MMF, which can be accomplished through the control plane
function of CN or RAN.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

• The AI basic functions between the four types of network entities can interact with
model, data and control information. For example,

◼ The AI basic function of CN collects data from the AI basic function of many
UEs, trains model, and provides services for AI use cases of UE QoE (Quality
of Experience) prediction

◼ In the case of limited AI computing resources at BS, the AI basic function of

BS can send the collected data and training control signaling to the AI basic
function of NMS and request NMS to execute the training. After executing the
calculation, NMS feedbacks the model to the AI basic function of BS

◼ The UE can download the model from the AI basic function at BS or CN to its
AI basic function, and then provide services for the AI use cases at UE.

• AI basic functions complete AI use cases independently or collaboratively.

Figure 10. AI-native system architecture

As mentioned above, the AI-native system is a closely collaborated system

composed of network entities such as CN, NMS, BSs and UEs. Whether an AI
application requires information exchange and collaboration among network entities
has a great impact on the algorithm and specification design. For example, according
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

to the collaboration level shown in Figure 11, in signaling level collaboration (Level 1),
the lifecycle management needs to be performed on one side or both sides
independently, while in the case of tight collaboration (Level 3), the lifecycle
management requires to be tightly coupled on both sides.

Figure 11. Collaboration levels of AI-native communication systems

Another promising feature of AI-native system is the ability of self-evolution,

which is achieved by continuously collecting data, extracting knowledge, and
iteratively interacting with the environment and users during the operation. The self-
evolution automates the updating and elimination of old modules and the derivation of
new ones, gradually building a more efficient communication system. According to the
level of complexity, the self-evolution can be divided into 4 stages.

• Stage A: the parameters of the AI model can be evolved while the

hyperparameters, inputs and outputs of the AI model are fixed.

• Stage B: the system can evolve and replace the structure, model,
hyperparameters of the AI model, etc.

• Stage C: the system can update, combine and delete existing modules
according to predefined rules, and can search and discover new modules
autonomously.

• Stage D: the system can autonomously determine and modify the self-
evolution rules.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

There are several schemes for applying AI to specific communication use cases.
The first one is AI based single-module optimization scheme. Examples include AI-
based localization, beam management, precoding, channel coding, channel estimation,
mobility management, resource allocation, traffic prediction [20~22]. The second one
is AI based multi-module joint optimization scheme that models multiple interrelated
functional modules into one AI model. For example, the processes related to MIMO
signal processing such as channel estimation, channel feedback and precoding are
modeled as a joint problem [23], where the spectral efficiency is used as the global loss
function to obtain the optimal MIMO transmission scheme. Taking the simplified flow
of physical layer signal processing as an example, Figure 12 illustrates the AI based
single-module optimization and AI based multi-module joint optimization. Considering
multiple factors such as industrial ecological development and standardization progress,
we believe that the evolution of AI-native system is a gradually evolving process:
starting from the AI based single-module optimization and then gradually realizing AI
based multi-module joint optimization.

Figure 12. Examples of single-module optimization and multi-module joint

optimization for physical layer signal processing

In the following, some applications of AI in communication systems are presented.

The CSI feedback problem can be implemented by an auto-encoder based AI neural
network [24]. Figure 13 shows the performance of AI-based CSI feedback compared to
the eType II codebook-based CSI feedback (traditional non-AI scheme). The detailed
simulation parameters can be found in [24]. With the same feedback overhead, the AI-
based channel feedback can achieve about 10% spectral efficiency gain.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Spectral efficiency gain compared to the eType II codebook scheme

with 64bit feedback
25
Spectral efficiency gain (%)

20

15

10

0
60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 240
feedback bits

eType II AI based method

Figure 13. Spectral efficiency gains with different channel feedback schemes in
Urban Micro scenario

AI can also be used in wireless signal-based positioning where AI can be utilized

to exploit the hidden relationship between the reference signal and the user's location
to achieve high accuracy positioning. Figure 14 shows the positioning accuracy with
the various wireless signal-based positioning methods [25]. The AI-based positioning
method can ensure a 90% accuracy with the positioning error of 4 meters, while all
other schemes can offer a 90% accuracy with the positioning error of 20 meters or even
more.

35 32.12 32.81 32.41

30
accuracy (meter)
90% localization

25 20.16
20
15
10 4.14
5
0
AI DL-TDOA UL-TDOA RTT AOA

Figure 14. Positioning accuracy of various wireless signal-based positioning methods

AI can also be used to solve the Demodulation Reference Signal (DMRS) based
channel estimation problem by obtaining the channel estimation results of all time-
frequency resources from the channel estimation results of the time-frequency resource
where the DMRS is located [26]. The prototype system developed by vivo shows that,
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

even with half of the DMRS resource overhead, the channel estimation offered by AI-
based DMRS can achieve a lower BLER and higher throughput than that by the non-
AI scheme.

AI-native 6G system has to overcome lots of challenges. Firstly, the ability to

efficiently collect data is crucial. AI requires large amounts of data for training, while
the required data contains private information associated with users, operators and
vendors that cannot be easily transferred. In this regard, federated learning [27] and
swarm learning [28] could be the important directions to be considered. Secondly, AI
models inherently suffer from a lack of generalization ability, which will be further
aggravated by the varying wireless communication environments. Transfer learning
[29], meta learning [30], and other few-shot learning can be the potential solutions to
solve this problem.

The understanding of 6G AI-native system within the industry includes not only AI
enabling 6G communication systems, i.e., AI as internal services, but also 6G system
providing AI services for thousands of industries, i.e., AI as external services. AI
resources deployed in 6G system can be provided for both internal and external services
through proper orchestration. However, there are significant differences in
requirements and architecture between internal and external services. From the
requirement aspect, on one hand, the use cases of internal and external services are quite
different in terms of problem modeling, AI collaborators, data collection and transfer,
model requirement, AI inference accuracy, latency and computation requirement, etc.
It is difficult to meet the personalized service requirements of AI for thousands of
industries with a highly efficient system that enables the intelligence of the
communication system itself. From the architecture point of view, on the other hand,
external AI services are often built on top of communication bearers, hence they need
to go through more layers of communication protocols, additional encryption and
privacy protection, etc. Internal AI instances can collect data, transfer and manage
model through AI and 6G signaling and protocol at each layer. In addition, the internal
services usually do not require billing and service control. Whether the AI-native
system architecture can be efficiently integrated with the external AI service
architecture of mobile computing network needs further study.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

4.5 Data function and data plane

Data is a common requirement for all the services of 6G, i.e., super communication
service, basic information service and converged computing service. Data function is a
supporting technology for enabling technologies such as AI-native system, ISAC,
convergence of mobile network and computing, etc. Data function needs to efficiently
fulfill the requirements of multiple services.

For super communication service, data function needs to enhance cross-domain

data collaboration, data reuse efficiency and time-accumulation effect. The cross-
domain data collaboration includes data collaboration among CN, RAN, UEs, external
functions, etc. The data reuse shall facilitate avoidance the duplicated collection of the
same or similar data in a point-to-point approach. A small amount of immediate data
available at a single time instance is difficult to meet the demand of 6G AI-native
system. Therefore, the persistent data at multiple time instances are beneficial for the
time cumulation.

For the control optimization of new services (e.g., sensing and computing), the data
function provides real-time status of network functions and resources, such as location
information of sensing nodes (e.g., BSs or UEs), UE movement speed, communication
load, computing load, etc. For user-level data, the generation, collection and storage of
personal data are supported by the data function according to the user's requirements
and authorization. The user-level data control and storage need to be done at data nodes
that are owned by the individual user. Any function inside or outside the network that
is not authorized by the user cannot control, access or use user-level personal data. The
data function provides the technical support for personal data protection with
administration and data leakage traceability.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Figure 15. 6G data function and data plane

6G data function provides the common basic data required by the network,
including network data, UE-level data and non-UE-level data, etc., rather than point-
to-point data between application functions or communication control data. Currently,
the logic of UP functions is to provide the paid data transmission, while the logic of CP
(Control Plane) functions is to guarantee the high-priority and real-time transmissions
of control information. However, the logic of data function needs to consider payment
to the data provider, and the priority of data function is not as high as control plane
functions. The data function may also be different from the existing CP/UP in terms of
security and mobility, etc. The potential termination points of data may lay in CN, RAN
(Radio Access Network) or UE. The equality between UE data function and network
data function can be enhanced. Therefore, solutions of 6G data function need to
prioritize holistic solutions that can meet the requirements of multiple services and
functions, and avoid pieces of fragmented solutions that address the requirements of
individual service or function.

Data plane, with end-to-end connectivity, is a potential solution consisting of CN

data plane functions, RAN data plane functions and UE data plane functions. The data
plane is responsible for data collection, privacy and security, data analytics, data pre-
processing and data storage. The introduction of the data plane helps improve the logic
of the division of responsibilities among network functions and the flexibility of UE
design. The key technologies of data plane are described as follows:

• Data definition and classification: Data definition and classification are the
fundamental issues of data plane. The scope of data extends from existing
communication related data by means of NWDAF (Network Data Analytics
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Function), SON (Self-Organizing Network), MDT (Minimization of Drive

Tests) and QoE to data related to information service and computing service.
Data can be classified and graded in terms of multiple dimensions, such as
application scenarios, data sources, security requirements, data volumes and
so on.

• Diverse data interactions: Data interactions of data plane can be single point
to multipoint, multipoint to single point or multipoint to multipoint. Data
termination point can be at the CN, RAN or UE. Therefore, data plane
functions need to support diverse data interaction requirements efficiently.

• Mechanisms for privacy protection and security: Privacy and security are
fundamental functions that must be supported by data services. Information
service and computing service may increase the risk of user privacy exposure.
Therefore, the security mechanisms for authorization, collection and
processing of user data need to be enhanced accordingly. In addition, the
trustworthiness of the UE original data is decided by the security of UEs. The
authentication mechanism of data services needs to be able to prevent security
issues such as malicious forged UE identity. When data is provided to the
external functions, key actions of the data processing need to be recorded,
which can be used as digital forensics by the regulatory departments to
determine whether data usage complies with the law.

4.6 Extremely low power communication

Extremely low power communication (ELPC), with features of low cost, low
power and huge number of connections, is one of the key technologies to realize
ubiquitous connectivity. Compared with existing 5G IoT devices, extremely low power
devices are expected to have lower deployment cost, lower power consumption with
only about a hundred microwatt or even zero power required. Particularly, in addition
to providing about a hundred Kbps communication data rates at the coverage of about
a hundred meter, the extremely low power devices can also support positioning and
sensing services, and thus eventually enable the interconnection between the physical
and the digital worlds.

In broad sense, the typical use cases of ELPC can be categorized as wide-area
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

coverage scenarios and local-area coverage scenarios. To name a few examples, wide-
area coverage scenarios include logistics and warehousing, environmental monitoring,
smart agriculture, railroad operation and maintenance, powerline inspection, industrial
IoT, etc. Local area coverage scenarios include smart home, wearable devices, low
power health monitoring, implantable medical, etc.

Extremely low power transmitting technology

Backscatter communication is the most representative technology of ELPC. In

principle, backscatter communication devices modulate data bits by reflecting and
modifying the signal properties, (amplitude, frequency, and phase) of incident RF
signals from the environment, through the use of adjustable antenna impedances. A
typical backscatter communication device is composed of the following hardware
modules: antenna, energy harvesting module or battery, microcontroller, receiver,
channel coding and modulation module, memory or sensor. Additionally, low power
amplifier can be applied to improve receiving sensitivity and the power of backscattered
signals.

Incident RF signal Sin(t)

Energy
Harvester
&Battery Backscatter signal Sout(t)

Mirco-
controller

Receiver

ΓT(t)

Modulation Load
&Coding Impedance

Memory ΓT=Γ0 ΓT=Γ1 ...

&Sensor

Figure 16. Backscatter communication hardware architecture and modulation

principle

Limited by the hardware capability of backscatter circuits, energy storage capacity,

transmit power of RF sources, double fading effects, receiving sensitivity, and antenna
gain, it is highly demanding to enhance the physical layer of backscatter communication
regarding date rates, coverage, connectivity, and reliability. To widen the application,
the key enabler techniques of backscatter communication include:
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

(1) Data rate enhancement: High order modulation schemes such as APSK
(Amplitude Phase Shift Keying) and QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) are
shown to be effective in improving transmission data rates. Besides, millimeter wave
and MIMO can also be applied to achieve high data rates in backscatter communication.
vCRI has built a backscatter prototype in collaboration with Beijing Jiaotong University,
which successfully achieved 2 Mbps with 4ASK (4-ary Amplitude Shift Keying) and
QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) modulation, preliminarily demonstrating the
feasibility of high data rates in backscatter communication.

Figure 17. Backscatter communication device prototype

(2) Coverage expansion: Bistatic architecture [31], beamforming, and high-

efficiency energy harvesting circuits are major techniques to improve the coverage of
backscatter communication. Moreover, the introduction of low power reflection
amplifier is also shown to be capable of expanding coverage by amplifying the transmit
power of backscatter devices [32]. Table 9 provides some link budget of backscatter
communication under some typical parameter settings. Accordingly, UE-assisted
bistatic architecture and low power amplifier can significantly extend the
communication range to hundreds of meters, demonstrating the feasibility of
integrating backscatter communication in cellular networks.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Table 9. Comparison of coverage for different deployment scenarios and architecture

ELPC Device ELPC Device

communicatio communicatio UE assisted
n with gNB n with gNB ELPC device
Parameters/Assumptions
directly directly (without
(without (with amplifier)
amplifier) amplifier)
Carrier frequency (GHz) 0.90 0.90 0.90

Tx Power (dBm) 36.00 36.00 23.00

RF Energy Source->ELPC 100.00 100.00 3.00

Device Distance (m)
Path Loss (dB) 71.48 71.48 41.03

Reflection Amplifier 0.00 20.00 0.00

Return Loss (dB) 8.00 8.00 8.00

ELPC Device Antenna Gain 0.00 0.00 0.00

(dB)
ELPC Device -43.48 -23.48 -26.03
Tx EIRP (dBm)
Reader Antenna Gain (dB) 6.00 6.00 6.00

Receiver Sensitivity (dBm) -92.00 -92.00 -92.00

MCL (backscatter link) (dB) 54.52 74.52 71.97

Coverage (backscatter 14.17 141.75 105.78

link) (meters)
Remark：The deployments can refer to the network architecture in Figure 19.

(3) Reliable transmission: Designing innovative channel coding schemes, e.g.,

code structure and low-complexity channel coding and decoding techniques, based on
the service characteristics, channel conditions, and usage scenarios are the key
technologies to reliable transmissions and quality of service provisioning in backscatter
communication. Moreover, a joint coding and modulation scheme with high code rate
can further enhance reliability while satisfying the low-cost and low power requirement
of backscatter communication. In addition, the space-time block code, which is
designed considering the load impedance matching characteristic, is another effective
technique for reliable improvement [33].

(4) Interference cancellation: The receiving sensitivity can be greatly improved by

 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

isolating the transmitting channel and receiving channel, e.g., separating transmitting
and receiving antennas, multi-port circulators, directional couplers, and carrier leakage
interference cancellation techniques, e.g., receiving dual circuit elimination, negative
feedback loop, dead zone amplifier offset. In bistatic architecture, if the RF signal
exhibits certain structural characteristics, e.g., the repetitive structure in time-domain
or frequency-domain, those structural characteristics can be leveraged to design some
special modulation scheme to effectively cancel cross-link interference [34].

Extremely low power receiving technology

Low power receiving technology is also a key factor in ELPC, including wake-up
and data reception. Particularly, low power wake-up receiver technology can enable the
standby power consumption at the micro watt level, and thus significantly extend the
battery life of terminal devices [35]. In addition to the low power wake-up receiver, the
low power data reception can be used in ELPC to achieve 10 Kbps~1000 Kbps data
rate reception under the active power consumption of 10 uW~100 uW.

Non-coherent detection receiver is the key technology to achieve extremely low

power reception. Particularly, the envelope detector directly transforms the RF signal
to low-frequency signal, which can effectively reduce the receiver complexity, and
reduce power consumption by 1/1000 - 1/100 folds, a reduction to the micro-watt level.
Although, non-coherent detection receiver can effectively reduce the receiving power,
it can also cause a loss of reception sensitivity. The communication range can be
extended through effective transmission signal waveform design. However, when the
low power receiver receives the target low power signal, it inevitably suffers from the
co-channel interference and adjacent channel interference, resulting in a high false
alarm detection probability and miss detection probability. Specifically, interference
can also be suppressed by some techniques such as RF/IFL filters, comparator threshold
adjustment and spread spectrum signal design. vCRI has built an extremely low power
receiver prototype jointly with University of Electronic Science and Technology. It
turns out that 10 kbps data rates can be achieved under the power consumption of only
tens of microwatts according to the advanced CMOS process evaluation, and the
receiving sensitivity is -73 dBm. The results validate the feasibility of high-sensitivity
data reception under extremely low power consumption.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Figure 18. Prototype of extremely low power receiving technology.

System Design of Extremely Low Power Communication

The cellular based ELPC system has two basic modes. Mode 1 is the BS direct link
mode, where the BS and the extremely low power device are directly connected for the
transmission and the reception of both the uplink and the downlink data. This network
deployment architecture in Mode 1 is simple, yet requires high receiving sensitivity in
both BSs and ELPC devices. Mode 2 is UE/relay assisted mode, where at least one of
uplink or downlink of the extremely low power device involves the UE or relay. This
mode can effectively reduce the receiving sensitivity and power consumption
requirements of extremely low power devices but introduces a little complexity in
system design.

A complicated network architecture brings new challenges to operation costs,

power consumption, and device costs. Thus, it is necessary to design a simplified
network architecture suitable for ELPC. In general, there are two possible network
architectures for cellular based ELPC system. In option 1, extremely low power devices
do not access core network. Instead, the core network only provides data transfer
between the extremely low power devices and an application server. The application
server records the entity which transfers data to the extremely low power device and
forwards the downlink data that is destined to the low power device to the entity. In
option 2, network operator provides a reader and proxies the extremely low power
device to access the core network. Conclusively, it is not necessary for extremely low
power devices to support NAS protocol stacks, which helps to reduce the power
consumption and costs. On the other hand, the core network can authenticate extremely
low power devices, perform mobility management and provide secure and fine-grained
services for the application.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Figure 19. Network architecture for cellular extremely low power communication.

In addition to the key technologies mentioned above, a few open issues remain to
be solved in order for cellular based ELPC to come true.

• Poor synchronization: Limited by the costs and power consumption of ELPC

devices, the internal passive oscillation exhibits inaccurate sampling time and
random drifts in time, dramatically degrading the communication performance and
network capacity. Therefore, it is important and critical to address the
synchronization issue without increasing the cost and power consumption of the
device.

• Massive access technology: 6G is expected to support massive IoT devices with

connection densities 10-100 times higher than in 5G. Conventional multiple access
techniques based on collision management or grant-based orthogonal multiple
access are not suitable for extremely low power devices. Thus, development of new
multiple access techniques to meet the connectivity requirement of extremely low
power devices is the key.

• Lightweight protocol stack: Considering the limitations regarding the costs, the
power consumption and the complexity of ELPC devices, lightweight protocol
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

stacks and simplified security mechanisms should be studied and designed to

satisfy the service requirements.

4.7 MIMO evolution

The convergence of multi-antenna technology and OFDM technology improves

the performance of 5G communication systems. 6G system is expected to achieve not
only higher data rates, higher frequency and energy efficiency, but also focus on user
experience in specific areas, such as coverage performance at the cell edge and
communication performance in ultra-dense areas of hotspots. The evolution of multi-
antenna technology in 6G includes centralized MIMO technology supporting higher
frequency bands and large-scale distributed MIMO technology like cell free MIMO
networking technology, etc.

The number of antenna units integrated in the same size antenna panel will increase
when a higher frequency band is used in the communication system. 6G BSs, especially
in the higher frequency bands, will be equipped with larger antenna arrays to provide
finer beamforming. As the wavelength of the high band shrinks to the millimeter or sub-
millimeter level, the area near the antenna panel of the high frequency band BS can be
regarded as under the near-field channel condition [36]. The near-field range of the
2𝑑2
wireless device, 𝐷𝑁𝐹 = , depends on the aperture of the device antenna array 𝑑
𝜆

and the wavelength of the wireless signal 𝜆. Under the near-field channel condition,
beamforming no longer targets just a beam direction, but specific locations of the users.
Therefore, MIMO technologies of 6G may evolve from far-field beamforming to near-
field beamforming, and eventually toward the holographic MIMO technology that
precisely generates an arbitrarily shaped beam.

In interference-limited scenarios, distributed MIMO technology can reduce the

impact of inter-cell interference for the cell edge users. The distributed MIMO
deployment can be achieved through the jointly beamforming of multiple BSs or
multiple TRPs, or the cooperation between the BS and other devices such as RIS or
beamforming relays. Distributed MIMO could provide different transmission schemes
depending on the capabilities of the wireless devices. For distributed transmitters with
high accuracy synchronization, the coherent MIMO transmission scheme could be used
to improve multiplexing gain, while for distributed transmitters with limited accuracy
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

synchronization, the non-coherent MIMO transmission scheme could be adopted to

achieve diversity gain. Differently distributed MIMO schemes are suitable for different
communication scenarios. For example, multi-TRP beamforming scheme is suitable for
enhancing the throughput in the hotspot scenario; the cooperation transmission of BS
and RIS/ relays can be used to improve the hotspot throughput and extend the cell
coverage.

Cell free MIMO technology [37] is suitable for the densely deployed networks.
Cell free MIMO systems dynamically schedule multiple BSs or network nodes to form
a distributed MIMO network to provide services for UEs according to the current
wireless channel conditions. Cell free MIMO technology breaks the traditional cell
boundary and transforms the mutual interferences from multiple cells into a distributed
MIMO network that collaborates with each other, greatly enhancing the coverage
performance of the wireless system and improving the UE mobility performance. In
order to balance the spectral efficiency per unit area and UE mobility, cell free MIMO
technology can be applied based on a two-layer networking scheme decoupling the
control plane and data plane. The control plane network is mainly responsible for the
signaling and process of the control plane including mobility management, etc. It
provides a ubiquitous coverage and highly reliable links for the control plane functions
by means of SFN (Single Frequency Network) involving multiple network nodes or
low-frequency-band macro station transmission. The data plane network is responsible
for serving user plane processes such as data transmission, dynamic node scheduling,
and data services provisioning to the users in a distributed MIMO transmission mode.

Figure 20. An example of cell free MIMO network deployment

 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

There are several challenges for 6G ultra large-scale MIMO technology, including
the hardware requirements and the algorithm designs.

 One of the key challenges is the hardware complexity and power consumption
in ultra large-scale MIMO systems. With the increase in the number of
antennas at BSs, especially the high-frequency-band BSs, the hardware
complexity and power consumption of the BSs will increase significantly. To
address this problem, a sparsely selected or sparsely distributed antenna array
can be used to reduce the cost and power consumption of the BS.

 Distributed MIMO technology leads to higher requirement on the hardware

performance at the BS. On the RF aspect, the distributed MIMO systems needs
to ensure high-precision time-frequency synchronization between the nodes to
realize a distributed MIMO transmission; on the baseband aspect, the networks
need to flexibly configure baseband computing resources according to the
network node grouping, including merging the baseband signals according to
the scheduled node grouping, and the joint transmission/reception and
processing of broadcast channels without knowing channel conditions.

 The 6G MIMO system requires allocation of more time and frequency

resources for channel measurement and channel information feedback. There
is a motivation to provide an efficient channel measurement and feedback
mechanism to keep a balance between the data rate and the channel
measurement accuracy. Considering the poorer penetration performance of
high-frequency signals, 6G high-frequency communication is likely to be used
for the high data rate transmission in LOS environments. 6G MIMO system
can utilize the signal characteristics of orbital angular momentum (OAM) to
design antenna arrays and codebooks to achieve multi-stream data
transmission in the LOS channel environment [38].

4.8 Reconfigurable intelligent surface

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) [39] is a low-cost, low power, flexibly

deployable hardware technology. RIS device can manipulate the electromagnetic
parameters (amplitude, phase, polarization direction, etc.) of the reflected or reradiated
signal by independently controlling the variable element (variable capacitors, PINs, etc.)
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

of the RIS unit. The reradiated modulated signals from many RIS units are
superimposed on each other to form the desired spatial beam at a macroscopic scale,
realizing the manipulation of the electromagnetic environment. Integrating RIS
technology with the wireless communication system can further enhance the flexibility
and transmission efficiency of the wireless communication system.

RIS technology can be deployed as an independent node in the communication

system to enhance the communication performance. The coverage performance of the
wireless networks can be improved by providing RIS-based reflection paths in poor
coverage scenarios. Independently deployed RIS nodes can also manipulate the
wireless signal propagation environment and improve the signal quality according to
the requirement of the wireless network, such as increasing the transmission rank of
MIMO in multipath environments or suppressing interference signals from other cells.

Figure 21. Improving the network performance via RIS

RIS technology can be applied in BSs or terminal equipment to form a new

transceiver architecture. Considering the limitation on the number of RF units in BS,
RIS module can be used as a further extension to the BS antennas acting as virtual
antennas to provide a finer beam manipulation. Furthermore, with the help of the index
modulation technique, the data bit stream to be transmitted are sequentially mapped by
the control module into RIS states of different time domain resources, which converts
the wireless signal into a modulated signal carrying data information.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Figure 22. Novel transceiver architecture via RIS

RIS technology has brought up new research issues while improving system
performance, including the hardware design issues and the network deployment issues
for RIS and communication convergence.

In the aspect of hardware design, the hardware parameters of the RIS device shall
match the working parameters of the wireless communication system. In a practical
deployment scenario with multiple operators and multiple cells, the RIS device will
receive wireless signals from multiple cells in different directions of different frequency
bands. In order not to impact the properties of the unrelated cells or signals on unrelated
frequencies, the working bandwidth of the RIS devices should match the working
bandwidth of the serving cells. The working bandwidth of the RIS device can be
approximated to that of the wireless communication system by optimizing the hardware
structure of the RIS unit. For example, for a RIS unit constructed with four square
patches, the working bandwidth could be reduced from 10 GHz to 1 GHz after attaching
the additional delay line structure, as shown in Figure 23 and Figure 24 [40]. In addition,
the working bandwidth of the RIS device can be further reduced by adding frequency
filter modules, such as frequency selective surfaces or filter elements.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

Figure 23. Optimizing RIS unit structure by adding delay line

Desired phase difference

180˚ ±10˚

Figure 24. Restricting RIS working bandwidth by optimizing RIS unit structure.

In terms of the network deployment, new channel measurement and scheduling

strategies should be designed based on the passive operating characteristics of RIS
devices. Considering the passive RIS devices do not have the capability of independent
channel estimation, RIS-based cascaded channel estimation and the corresponding RIS
beamforming are necessary for the integration of RIS in the communication systems.
When RIS technology in future wireless networks evolves from fixed-point
deployments to large-scale distributed deployments, the 6G system shall consider the
collaboration of RIS and BS to form the cell free MIMO networks instead of deploying
base stations to reduce the cost and power consumption.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

4.9 Delay-Doppler domain waveforms

The new waveform techniques considered by the industry or academia in recent

years can be categorized as follow. One category is the evolution of the CP-OFDM
(Cyclic Prefix Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) waveform adopted in
existing 3GPP NR (New Radio) protocols, which was originally intended to overcome
the sub-band/subcarrier interference problem of OFDM. The representative waveforms
are f-OFDM (Filtered OFDM), W-OFDM (Windowed OFDM), UFMC (Universal
Filtered Multi-Carrier), GFDM (Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing), etc.
[41~44]. There is also a class of waveforms based on QAM modulation techniques such
as FBMC-OQAM (Filter Bank Multi-Carrier with Offset QAM), FBMC-QAM, WCC-
FBMC-OQAM (Weighted Circular Convolution FBMC with Offset QAM) [45~47]
that aim to mitigate the out-of-band leakage of OFDM waveform while reducing the
complexity compared to the aforementioned filter-based techniques. There is also a
class of techniques that seek to further improve spectral efficiency by artificially
introducing inter carrier interference, inter symbol interference and corresponding non-
linear receiver algorithms, such as MC-FTN (Multi-Carrier Faster than Nyquist) [48].

In recent years, OTFS modulation techniques [49] have attracted much attention.
As a typical delay-Doppler domain waveform, OTFS migrates the digital signal
processing and analysis from the time-frequency domain to the delay-Doppler domain.
By exploiting the sparsity of the delay-Doppler channel, the OTFS can obtain more
diversity gain by two-dimensional spreading from the delay-Doppler domain to the
time-frequency domain, which shows excellent performance against Doppler-induced
inter carrier interference. Furthermore, the CP-free design in each symbol overwhelms
the OFDM waveform in spectral efficiency.

The OTFS waveform design in [49] requires a high complexity ISFFT transform,
and its OFDM-alike waveform suffers the off-grid interferences in delay-Doppler
domain. Alternative waveforms are being considered in the academia. For example, two
alternative single-carrier-like waveforms are respectively based on continuous and
discrete Zak transforms [50,51], and ODDM [52].

There are some key points in the research of practical OTFS waveform. Firstly,
since OFDM is still a very competitive waveform, the coexistence of OFDM and OTFS
in 6G system design needs to be considered. Secondly, the current pulse pilot design
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

results in high PAPR (Peak to Average Power Ratio) in time-domain signals, which has
limitation on the hardware implementation. Therefore, a low PAPR design needs to be
considered. Thirdly, the combination of OTFS and MIMO is a guarantee of high
transmission rates in high-speed scenarios. It is essential to design an efficient pre-
coding mechanism for MIMO-OTFS systems.

 OTFS and OFDM waveforms coexistence

Follow the principle of ISFFT transform and signal sampling, we can replicate the
modulated symbols in the delay-Doppler domain, which is equivalent to leave empty
carriers or empty OFDM symbols between the transformed symbols in the time-
frequency domain. These vacant time-frequency resources can be used to send OFDM
signals to achieve coexistence of the two and improve the efficiency of resource
utilization, as shown in Figure 25.

Type 1 Mapping
Slot 1 Slot 2 Slot 3 Slot L

OT OT OT OT
FS OFDM FS OFDM FS OFDM FS OFDM

One OFDM slot

. .
. .
. . Type 2
Type 1 . .
. .
. .

One OFDM slot

Type 2 Mapping

OT OT OT OT OT OT OT OT
OF DM OF DM OF DM OF DM
FS FS FS FS FS FS FS FS

Slot 1 Slot 2 Slot 3 Slot L

Figure 25. OTFS and OFDM hybrid frame

 Low PAPR pilot design

A sequence pilot design shown in Figure 26 effectively balances the power in each
delay dimension, thus fundamentally solving the high PAPR problem.

With this novel pilot sequence design, the improvement in PAPR performance is
evident as depicted in the CCDF plot in Figure 27. Meanwhile, the diversity gain in this
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

dimension is obtained as the pilot sequence spreads in the delay dimension, resulting in
a better channel estimation performance.

Figure 26. Low PAPR pilot design

Figure 27. PAPR performance of different schemes

 OTFS-MIMO Technique
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

An open-loop diversity precoding scheme for MIMO-OTFS is shown in Figure 28,

where the frame in the delay-Doppler domain at each antenna is equally divided into
two half-frames along the Doppler dimension, each mapped with a data layer. The
problem of inter-half-frame interference and channel phase offsets are solved by a
specific protective spacing design.

Figure 28. OTFS-MIMO open-loop precoding

The BER (Bit Error Ratio) performance of the proposed scheme outperforms the
OTFS-MIMO using CDD (Cyclic Delay Diversity), as well as the OFDM-MIMO using
STC (Space Time Code). More detailed simulation assumptions and performance
analysis can be found in [53].

As an emerging technology, OTFS technology has some real technical challenges,

mainly in the following areas.

• In some cases, the OTFS may be limited in the delay and Doppler resolutions,
and the presence of fractional delay and fractional Doppler scenarios will lead
to inaccurate channel estimation. As a result, BER error flooring exists in
symbol detection, particularly the case with higher order modulation and
continuous Doppler-shift channels. With better design methods and channel
estimation algorithms, the channel estimation gain of OTFS over OFDM
systems can be further improved.

• How to better integrate OTFS with MIMO is yet to be studied. The current
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

open-loop MIMO scheme is simple to implement, but does not make full use
of the channel information and thus brings limited performance improvement.
The implementation of closed-loop MIMO in the delay-Doppler domain, on
the other hand, suffers from the problem that complexity and performance
cannot be reconciled due to the double convolutional nature of the delay-
Doppler domain channel. Therefore, new designs of OTFS-MIMO need to be
further explored to approach the performance upper bound.

• OTFS receiver adopts a non-linear iterative equalizer which has a higher

complexity than the widely used linear equalizer in current communication
systems. The currently proposed OTFS low-complexity receivers [54] suffer
from degraded performance or high overhead, and better design solutions are
needed.

4.10 Other technologies

6G spectrum technologies

The demand for 6G peak data rate and user experienced data rate requires larger
system bandwidth and more spectrum resources. Spectrum band from 6GHz to 7GHz
has more than 1GHz continuous frequency resources and will be an important potential
candidate band for 6G. Flexible spectrum use that aggregates more licensed and
unlicensed frequency resources is an important technical means to achieve large
bandwidth and high throughput in low frequency bands. In addition, millimeter wave
and sub-THz are effective means to achieve "busy and hot" local hotspot coverage.

Channel coding and decoding

Potential channel coding and decoding schemes for 6G include:

 Channel coding for new scenarios: channel coding schemes for data rates
above 100 Gbps, channel coding schemes for ultra-high reliability and ultra-
low latency, and low-complexity channel coding schemes for very low power
communications, such as short code designs based on Polar, LDPC (Low
Density Parity Check Code), etc.

 Joint design and optimization of the channel coding module with other
modules: joint design of coding and modulation, joint design of detection and
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

decoding, joint source-channel coding, etc.

 AI-based channel coding techniques: AI-based code construction, model-

driven or data-driven AI channel coding schemes, AI-assisted decoding
schemes, etc.

Energy-efficient communication technologies for terminals

The energy efficiency of 6G terminals will be 10 to 100 times (i.e. 10 -10-10-9 J/bit
in magnitude) better compared to 5G, where the power consumption needed to achieve
data rates above 100Mbps is about 1000 mW (i.e. energy efficiency of 10-8 J/bit in
magnitude). This means that the power consumption to achieve 1Gbps data rates can
reach 1000 mW or even less than 100 mW, which will greatly enhance the user
experience of high-data rate services such as XR.

Transmissions with ultra-high bandwidths and design of extremely simple

waveforms are potential solutions for energy-efficient communication at the terminal.
On the one hand, extremely simple waveforms enable low complexity transceiver,
thereby reducing or eliminating the power consumption of terminal hardware (e.g.,
digital-to-analogue converters, inverters, etc.); on the other hand, transmission with
ultra-high bandwidths ensures high data rate requirements at low transmitting power.
Pulse radio is one of the candidates for extremely simple waveforms. It uses baseband
pulses of very short duration to transmit information and has the following advantages:
1) The pulse signal is generated in baseband without the need of complicated frequency-
domain processing, saving hardware such as inverters and frequency-domain
equalization filters compared to 5G devices; 2) The pulse signal is transmitted
intermittently at the RF front-end, requiring very little power; and 3) The reception of
pulsed signals can effectively mitigate multipath effects while suppressing interference
among multiple users. Terminal transceiver design, modulation coding scheme design,
and the coexistence of extremely simple waveforms with conventional waveforms are
all key points to be considered in future.

5 Conclusion

6G will provide super communication service, basic information service, and

converged computing service, and become the network information cornerstone for
building a freely connected physical and digital integrated world.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

6G service capability definition requires comprehensive consideration of demand,

technology and cost, balancing performance indicators and efficiency indicators. Super
communication performance indicators will improve several times or even orders of
magnitude compared to 5G, and will further expand coverage. The service content of
basic information is richer, including wireless sensing, enhanced network information
provision, and public information of industries. Converged computing services will
provide users with end-to-end latency and performance-guaranteed computing, storage
or intelligent services.

The expansion of service content and the improvement of service capability

require the redesign of system architecture to support communication, sensing,
computing, information, data and other functions and services. The convergence of
mobile network and computing realizes the capabilities of computing and intelligence,
all of which is contingent on establishing reliable signal and data communication. ISAC
opens another door for cellular wireless networks. 6G native-AI system will improve
network and air interface efficiency, enhance system flexibility and reduce O&M costs.
The introduction of an end-to-end cross-layer data plane is particularly necessary to
support native-AI system, ISAC, and basic information services. ELPC will reduce the
barrier to terminal access, enabling truly ubiquitous connectivity. MIMO evolution, RIS
technology, new waveforms and other technologies will be introduced to make 6G
network be more spectral efficient, more flexible in diverse scenarios, and more
supportive for sensing functions.

The research and development of 6G technologies are still in the early stage. vCRI
will continue to refine 6G usage scenarios, use cases and the related capability
indicators, carry out in-depth research and experimental verification of potential
technologies of 6G, and contribute to the development of a globally unified 6G
technology standard.
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

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Abbreviations

4ASK 4-ary Amplitude Shift Keying

AI Artificial Intelligence
API Application Program Interface
APN6 Application-aware IPv6 Networking
APSK Amplitude Phase Shift Keying
BER Bit Error Ratio
BS Base Station
CDD Cyclic Delay Diversity
CFN Compute First Networking
CFO Carrier Frequency Offset
CN Core Network
CP Control Plane
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

CP-OFDM Cyclic Prefix OFDM

CSI Channel State Information
DC Direct Current
DMF Data Management Functions
DMRS Demodulation Reference Signal
ELPC Extremely Low Power Communication
eMBB Enhanced Mobile Broadband
ESPRIT Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance
Techniques
FBMC-OQAM Filter Bank Multi-Carrier with Offset Quadrature Amplitude
Modulation
FBMC-QAM Filter Bank Multi-Carrier Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
FLOPS FLoating-point Operations Per Second
FMCW Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave
f-OFDM Filtered OFDM
GFDM Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing
GIS Geographic Information System
IETF Internet Engineering Task Force
IMS IP Multimedia Subsystem
IoT Internet of Things
ISAC Integrated Sensing And Communication
ISFFT Inverse Symplectic Finite Fourier Transform
LDPC Low Density Parity Check Code
LMF Location Management Function
LNA Low Noise Amplifier
LOS Line of Sight
MC-FTN Multi-Carrier Faster than Nyquist
MDT Minimization of Drive Tests
MEC Multi-Access Edge Computing
MMF Model Management Functions
mMTC Massive Machine Type Communication
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

MUSIC Multiple Signal Classification

NAS Non-Access Stratum
NEF Network Exposure Function
NMS Network Management System
NR New Radio
NWDAF Network Data Analytics Function
OAM Orbital Angular Momentum
ODDM Orthogonal Delay-Doppler Division Multiplexing
OFDM Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
OTFS Orthogonal Time Frequency Shift
PAPR Peak to Average Power Ratio
PGA Programmable Gain Amplifier
QAM Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
QoE Quality of Experience
QoS Quality of Service
QPSK Quadrature Phase Shift Keying
RAN Radio Access Network
RCS Radar Cross Section
SC-FDE Single Carrier Frequency Domain Equalization
SFO Sampling Frequency Offset
SMS Short Message Service
SNR Signal-to-Noise Ratio
SON Self-Organizing Network
SRv6 Segment Routing over IPv6
STC Space Time Code
STO Symbol Timing Offset
TOPS Tera Operations Per Second
TRP Transmission Reception Point
UFMC Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier
URLLC Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications
 6G Services, Capabilities and Enabling Technologies

VoNR Voice over New Radio

WCC-FBMC- Weighted Circular Convolution Filter Bank Multi-Carrier with
OQAM Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
W-OFDM Windowed OFDM
XR Extended Reality