The Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University in Boston has opened a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)-funded research center focused on future open, programmable, and disaggregated 6G systems. Known as Open6G, the technical effort will be housed at Northeastern University’s Institute for Wireless Internet of Things, which has been active in the wireless, defense, computing, and manufacturing industries.
The new Open6G facility will occupy the Innovation Campus in Burlington, MA and will be co-located with Colosseum, the world’s largest radio frequency channel emulator. The sprawling campus allows the building and testing of intelligent, autonomous, collaborative, wireless technologies for military and commercial use; an artificial intelligence (AI) computing facility; and one of the world’s largest anechoic chambers. Continue Reading
Open6G’s overarching goal is to create a federal-industry-university cooperative research, development, testing, and commercialization hub to jumpstart beyond-5G systems research. It will explore themes such as future spectrum access and exploitation, performance of Open RAN architectures, AI/ML for inference and control, mmWave and Terahertz systems, Digital Twins, Augmented and Virtual Reality, and Web 3.0, among others.
6G in Singapore
Northeastern University is not alone in its pursuit of the 6G future. Singapore wants to become a global hub for 6G R&D. Singapore University of Technology and Design, a scientific telecom research institution, has launched the Future Communications Connectivity FCC Lab (FCCLab), which plans to combine 6G R&D with the AI Mega Centre. FCCLab will examine emerging technologies such as holographic communications and intelligent sensing capabilities to support the next generation of self-driving cars and drones.
6G in Finland
In May, several Finnish research organizations founded a coalition to advance Finland’s 6G competitiveness, known as Flagship 6G. The goals are to build new international partnerships, intensify national 6G cooperation by more prioritized and coordinated joint actions, and increase the impact of Finnish 6G expertise globally.
Since then, funding has come in from around the world. The European Union has provided funding for Finland’s Flagship 6G for a number of projects from Terahertz (THz) integrated systems enabling 6G Terabit-per-second ultra-massive MIMO wireless networks to sustainable IoT, light-based energy harvesting, and THz Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface assisted ultra-high data rate wireless. Nokia donated funds to four Finnish universities to support technology research, education and innovation, including University of Oulu and Aalto University and the universities of Helsinki and Tampere.
Additionally, Japan has shown its support. The University of Oulu in Finland and Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology have agreed on collaboration on communications technology beyond 5G and 6G technologies.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
Reader Interactions