6G Ready – Characterizing the Environment

6G will have to support extreme communication requirements and schedule the shared resources between even more devices. To make this efficient, the network must observe the real environment in even more granularity. 

The sensitivity of the network can be increased for properties visible at the device or at the network level, including:

• Information available from the different sensors within the UE which could lead at a better characterization of the user mobility e.g. accelerometer, movement sensors, etc.
• Signal strength measurements – enabling the understanding of the communication environment in a specific position, especially important when the communication is executed in a massive MIMO environment
• Network sensing – information from the RAN on the different environment characteristics
• Weather information and weather prediction – to understand the evolution of the communication capacity depending on physical environment characteristics
• Devices active in a specific interest area – understanding the momentary resource consumption in each area
• Compute and network resources – especially in dynamic deployed environments, it is important to understand if the resources required are available and where

With this information more sophisticated scheduling algorithms can be used, providing a more granular more accurate and less prone to side effects resource allocation.