The companies have jointly developed and tested an AI-powered 6G radio receiver that can bypass signal distortion and coverage issues inherent in 6G bands
In sum — what to know:
A new AI-based 6G receiver — Nokia has unveiled a new AI-powered 6G radio receiver that demonstrates significantly improved uplink distance compared to regular receivers.
Nokia tap R&S for testing — The 6G receiver was tested using Rohde & Schwarz’s test equipment to accurately emulate real-world conditions.
Potential to accelerate 6G roll-out — Nokia says the receiver may help speed up 6G deployment by allowing operators to leverage existing 5G footprint, cutting both time and cost.
Despite being a buzz for years, 6G is still a good half a decade away from becoming a commercial reality. There are numerous challenges staring at us today. One of the first breakthroughs required to make it a reality is getting around its coverage limitations.
6G uses higher frequency bands which behave differently than the lower frequency bands used by 5G. The signals suffer high path loss, poor penetration, and atmospheric absorption — in other words, they have shorter ranges and are blocked easily by obstacles. This issue has been identified as one of 6G’s the most significant barriers to deployment.
“This would be a big issue for network operators, as it might prevent them from reusing their existing cell towers with 6G frequencies. If not resolved, the operators would need to install additional towers at extra cost to deploy 6G,” Dani Korpi, Sr. speciality at Nokia Bell Labs, told RCRTech.
“One way to increase the transmission distance and coverage would be to request mobile devices to use higher transmit powers to account for the additional path loss. However, this comes with its own challenges since increasing the transmit power beyond a certain point will reduce the quality of the signal due to nonlinear distortion,” Korpi said.
Now, together with Rohde & Schwarz, Nokia has created and tested a 6G radio receiver that can tackle the coverage challenges and — potentially fast-track 6G network rollout by bridging the gap between 5G and 6G. According to Nokia Bell Labs, in practice, the new technology boosts uplink coverage by anywhere between 10 percent and 25 percent compared to the receivers used today.
How does it do that? The new receiver leverages AI signal correction that enables it to spot and correct signal distortions, allowing the signals to go longer distances without significant attenuation. That way it not only delivers substantial uplink performance gains — but also better throughput and higher energy efficiency. Advanced AI-native receivers like it enable base stations to process noisy and distorted signals.
The test was conducted under real-world conditions in a hardware-in-the-loop testbed consisting of R&S’s SMW200A, a vector signal generator for testing demanding applications, and the newly launched R&S FSWX signal and spectrum analyzer that measured the receiver’s AI inference performance. Full demo here.
“With this setup, we supported Nokia Bell Labs to assess the performance of their AI receiver models by analyzing performance metrics such as BER, BLER, and throughput directly within the measurement application. Rigorous testing of such advanced AI implementations in hardware-in-the-loop measurements is a crucial step to assess the true potential of AI-enhanced receiver designs for future 6G communication systems,” noted Andreas Oeldemann, Progam Manager AI for Wireless at Rohde & Schwarz.
Nokia is set to demonstrate the proof-of-concept (PoC) at the Brooklyn 6G summit this week.
The work with R&S comes two years after the duo collaborated in 2023 for testing Nokia Drone Networks in North America — an initiative for which R&S helped the telecom and IT giant secure FCC certification.