By Godson Umejiego, Correspondent USA

There are many candidates to make 6G – or beyond 5G – a reality by 2030. One of them is the Orthogonal Time Frequency and Space, or simply OTFS, waveform. According to Professor Ronny Hadani of the University of Texas, Austin – which launched a research centre on 6G – OTFS is a promising waveform.

“What makes the OTFS waveform unique is that it’s basically oblivious to distortion. It can go through the environment; the environment tries to distort it, but the waveform is shaped in such a way that no matter what the environment does to it the waveform doesn’t change its shape,” he explained in an interview with 6GWorld.

In his opinion, OTFS will be part of future standards for telecommunications. “I think OTFS should be part of the next standard, because it answers particular use cases in the best way. I think the next standard will be a multi-waveform standard, though – for example, Wi-Fi works very well in many use cases and OFDM is optimal for certain things. So OTFS will be part of an arsenal of tools for the networks to use in different environments,” he said.

“I think the more complex part will be to bring it closer to a real industrial use, to make it scalable, worth investing money in. It’s never about the technology; it’s about other things. In this case, I think it will depend on the question: ‘Is 5G living up to its promises?’”

What Will We Do with 6G?

We are thrilled when thought leaders submit their contributions to the website as well. That was the case with Ken Wieland, whose guest article “What Will We Do with 6G?” was published in January 2021.

In his article, Wieland discusses what are the possibilities and the use cases 6G may enable – or benefit from – by 2030, when it is expected by many researchers and companies to be available.

“The notion of human ‘immersion’ and interaction with the digital world is a recurring 6G theme. In an early 6G white paper published by research university Virginia Tech (VT) in February 2019, the authors flagged the potential of wireless brain-computer interactions (BCI). Traditional BCI applications, they said, were pretty much limited to healthcare scenarios where humans can control prosthetic limbs or nearby computing devices using brain implants,” he wrote.

Still, he noted that not everyone is adamant about the next generation of mobile connectivity’s need, especially at the expense of the 5G development. “Given that tech visions can become blurred (or postponed) as time passes, Vice President of technology development and strategy at T-Mobile USA, Karri Kuoppamaki sounded a note of caution. ‘It’s OK to get excited about 6G, but we have to get excited the right way,’ he said. ‘We should avoid unnecessary hype and not fall victim to the shiny object syndrome.’”