6G Technology Forum Held in Beijing to Explore Innovation Paths

BEIJING, March 28 (Reporter) — The 6G Technology and Industry Innovation Forum, part of the Zhongguancun Forum Annual Meeting, took place in Beijing on March 27, according to a report from People’s Daily Online. Centred on the theme “Breakthroughs in 6G Key Technologies and Paths for Industrial Innovation”, the forum delved into topics including “semantic agent communication networks”, “low-altitude sensing networks” and “wireless access network architectures and key technologies”.

Wen Ku, Chairman of the China Communications Standards Association, stated that the development of the 6G industry must take terminals as the core carrier, as their maturity directly determines whether 6G can truly enter the market and benefit industries. He emphasized the need to abandon unrealistic and unfeasible scenario concepts, eliminate pure technological research divorced from applications, and move away from the misunderstanding of “valuing technology over commerce”, striving to build a business model that is investable, affordable, replicable and self-sustaining. He called for pooling consensus among industry, academia, research and application sectors to build an open, compatible and long-term stable global 6G industrial ecosystem, promoting high-quality and sustainable industrial development.

Zhang Ping, Counsellor of the State Council and Professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, delivered a report titled “Constructing a Semantic Agent Communication Network”. He noted that to meet the higher speed indicators of future 6G, the traditional method of increasing capacity would lead to a sharp surge in demand for spectrum resources, posing more severe challenges to the evolution of mobile communications. Semantic communication, through the “compute-then-transmit” model, no longer takes increasing bandwidth as the main goal of capacity enhancement, but instead pursues intelligent and simplified development across multiple dimensions: devices, channels, algorithms, networking and applications. Based on the intelligent simplified network and ComAI framework, Zhang further proposed a “three-layer, four-body, four-stage” semantic agent communication network architecture, which can address three major challenges in 6G evolution: the non-linearity of information transmission, the high dimensionality of information space and the complexity of information processing, laying the direction for building semantic agent communication networks.

Li Ming, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, gave a report entitled “Breaking Through Traditional Compression to Accelerate 6G Transmission — Understanding is Compression”. He pointed out that with the limitation of high-frequency bandwidth, compression is the way forward. If AI large models can truly understand information, they possess the potential for efficient compression. Utilizing the models’ ability to “predict the next word” for arithmetic coding can break the Shannon limit at the semantic level. Experiments have proven that this new approach increases text compression rates by 4 to 5 times and image compression rates by 2 to 3 times, meaning 6G can achieve semantic-level transmission with the help of AI and provide a new path to break the Shannon limit and alleviate the high-frequency bandwidth bottleneck.

Huang Yuhong, Dean of the Zhongguancun Pan-Union Institute and President of China Mobile Research Institute, delivered a keynote speech titled “Strengthening Sensing with Networks and Refining Precision with Intelligence to Build a Low-Cost, Ubiquitous and Trustworthy Low-Altitude Sensing Network”. She stated that urban low-altitude sensing faces two core challenges: the high cost of large-scale deployment of sensing infrastructure and the difficulty in ensuring sensing credibility in complex environments. In response, China Mobile innovatively proposed the “strengthen sensing with networks, refine precision with intelligence” integrated communication-sensing technical path, leveraging the scale effect of communication networks to enhance sensing capabilities and using intelligent algorithms to improve sensing precision through multi-dimensional feature mining and in-depth integration, aiming to build a low-cost, ubiquitous and trustworthy low-altitude sensing network that complements traditional sensing methods such as radar and becomes an important part of low-altitude infrastructure.

Chen Shanzhi, Deputy General Manager and Chief Engineer of China Information and Communications Technology Group, delivered a keynote speech titled “The Mark of 6G and Its Technological and Industrial Innovation”, sharing the company’s basic innovation work in the 6G field. He noted that 6G will focus on solving industry application problems not fully addressed by 5G, realizing a leap from serving people and things to global three-dimensional coverage and the Internet of Everything. Its core marks are satellite-terrestrial integration and agent communication, two changes that will be completely different from the development of mobile communications from 1G to 5G. 6G will go beyond connectivity to build a space-ground integrated, user-centric platform integrating communication, sensing, computing and intelligence, driving industrial intelligence and the development of new businesses.

During the forum, the Zhongguancun Pan-Union Institute, China Mobile Research Institute, China Mobile Beijing Company and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications jointly released a series of achievements from the Beijing Key Laboratory of 6G Communication-Sensing-Computing-Intelligence Converged Wireless Cloud Network Technology. These include the “6G Reconfigurable Open Innovation Network Platform Enabling Embodied Intelligence” and the “6G Space-Ground Intelligent Simplified Semantic Stereo Communication Network Test and Application Platform”, showcasing the latest breakthroughs in fields such as bidirectional empowerment between 6G reconfigurable networks and AI, space-ground integrated intelligent simplified semantic transmission, low-altitude channel testing and intelligent electromagnetic environment modeling.