Ultra-Low Power and High-Data Rate Short-Range Wireless Enables Fully Immersive 6G

6G Short-range communications, showcasing 4K VR services

With the large-scale commercialization of 5G, the wireless industry, including Huawei, has started researching 6G, the next generation of mobile communications technology. Through extreme connectivity, 6G will provide an all-wireless and immersive experience for human-centric communications and enable the era of "connected intelligence."

Short-range communications typically operates in high frequency bands such as millimeter wave (mmWave) or even Tera-Hertz (THz), and is expected to provide wireless connections as integrated side-links over the "last meters" with very high throughput, very low latency, and very low power consumption. Such extreme performance for short-range communications aims to replace wired connections with free movement and a truly immersive experience. Examples include immersive interactions based on extended reality (XR), holographic communications, and novel interfaces for the metaverse.

The Huawei 6G Research Team has developed a prototype featuring ultra-low power consumption, ultra-high throughput, and ultra-low latency for short-range communications using the mmWave band 70 GHz. This enables devices to communicate at a throughput higher than 10 Gbit/s (Giga bits per second) with sub-millisecond latency. The transmission rate is several times higher than that of wired USBs, and the power consumption of the entire system is less than 560 mW.

The prototype uses a host of cutting-edge technologies, including:

• Tbit/s throughput with low-power polar encoding/decoding. Based on algebraic codes, this technology replaces moderate-rate outer codes to simplify the SC decoding process, boost the decoding throughput, and reduce the chip area by 80%, compared with traditional short-range coding schemes.
• Low-power 1-bit ADC. With a limited number of ADC bits, the power consumption of RF chains is significantly reduced. This technology uses the zero-crossing modulation with oversampling at the receiver side to enhance system spectral efficiency.
• Adaptive beam sweeping with a high-speed short-range phased array. This technology uses novel dual-polarized phased arrays to independently transmit dual-stream data at a high speed. When combined with the adaptive beam sweeping mechanism powered by AI-based prediction algorithms, this technology accurately adjusts beam directions with an ultra-low beam scanning overhead, even in scenarios with mobility.
• High-efficiency SiGe large-scale antenna array with antenna in package (AIP). The large-scale, high-gain irregular array architecture can be integrated in a LTCC (Low Temperature Co-Fired Ceramic) packaging module with a real smartphone form factor, so that the miniature AIP can also be implemented in wearables.

Huawei is committed to providing cost-effective extreme connectivity for customers. The Huawei 6G Research Team is dedicated to enhancing the communication experience of next-generation communications systems and providing immersive human-centric services for the "connected intelligence" era. To achieve that, extreme-performance short-range communications is an important enabling technology.