Collaborative Synergy:
The Key to Unlocking 6G’s Potential
As we stand on the brink of the next phase in wireless technology evolution, 6G promises to transform how we connect the digital and physical worlds. This technology could revolutionize connectivity by seamlessly integrating applications that will redefine our daily lives, such as smart cities and advanced healthcare.
The potential use cases for 6G are evolving and can be categorized into three broad areas: smart everything, sensing, and global coverage. The transition from smartphones to smart devices to smart everything will continue into the 6G era, creating unprecedented amounts of data and wirelessly connected environments on a greater scale. Adding sensing capabilities to wireless networks will provide new dimensions of data, enabling advanced applications. With the rise of non-terrestrial networks, 6G promises complete global coverage, ensuring connectivity no matter where we are.
Each of these use cases spans various applications, including:
- Advanced Robotics: Enhancing human-robot interactions on manufacturing floors with sensors and more connections to more devices and robots.
- Immersive Communications: Using sensors to communicate data and sense motions for gesture control, creating more immersive experiences.
- Massive Twinning: Leveraging more data sources from more geographically dispersed locations to create highly accurate digital twins.
- Sustainability: By developing more energy-efficient networks and implementing sustainable practices, 6G could play a significant role in meeting Net Zero targets.
Collaborating with industry players, academia, and government agencies around the world is essential to enable these applications. Keysight works with various entities on 6G research projects. Recent announcements include collaborations with the following entities around centimeter-wave (cmWave) / frequency range 3 (FR3):
- Ericsson: Keysight has an ongoing relationship with Ericsson on 6G research. The fruits of this collaboration were showcased at MWC both in 2024 and 2025. This year, the companies worked together to develop a pre-6G test setup using cmWave spectrum, which has garnered significant attention in the industry over the past year due to the availability of large bandwidths in frequencies between 7 and 15 GHz.
- Analog Devices: Showcased at MWC25, this collaboration focuses on component characterization and led to a demonstration on how to streamline the characterization of complex radio frequency front-ends (RFFE) operating at FR3 frequencies in Keysight’s booth.
6G represents a paradigm shift in wireless communications, requiring expertise in new technology areas beyond spectrum like artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML), sensing, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) / intelligent reconfigurable surfaces (IRS). Collaborating with service providers, vendors, research institutions, and universities on research projects for these areas is essential to advance 6G. To that end, Keysight augmented its participation in European 6G projects and collaborated with Northeastern University and NVIDIA on AI-RAN research:
- 6G Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS-JU): Keysight joined UNITY-6G and 6G-VERSUS on top of its involvement in IMAGINE B5G, CENTRIC, 6G-SANDBOX, and 6G-SHINE. Its participation in these projects served as the foundation for our digital twin demonstration at MWC25, where we showed how the digital twin of a large-scale private network could enable researchers to gain insights into the performance of 6G candidate technologies and improve them.
- Northeastern University: At MWC, we demonstrated the dynamic allocation of cloud resources and continuous testing of AI and RAN workloads over the fronthaul interface in collaboration with Northeastern University, leveraging their AI and RAN reference system on a shared O-Cloud compute cluster with our user equipment (UE) / O-RAN radio unit (O-RU) emulation solution.
- NVIDIA: We teamed up with NVIDIA to develop an RF ray tracing solution that can model deployment scenarios in 3D. That solution, RaySim, was on display at MWC to demonstrate how researchers can create site-specific RF propagation across different spectrum environments. Accurate site-specific RF propagation scenarios and channel models are particularly crucial for AI-RAN in the context of 6G because they enable the creation of highly realistic simulations.
Collaborative Synergy: Shaping the Future of 6G Connectivity
When it comes to 6G research, three main technology areas have emerged:
- Spectrum technologies, which include all frequency bands from sub-7 GHz to cmWave, millimeter-wave (mmWave), and sub-THz.
- Novel 6G research, which encompasses new technologies being investigated for 6G, such as AI / ML, integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) / joint communications and sensing (JCAS) and RIS / IRS.
- New network architectures like non-terrestrial networks (NTN) and O-RAN, which started in 5G, and will need to be optimized for 6G.
6G researchers face various challenges in these areas including performing complex simulations and emulations to benchmark spectral optimizations and design at all frequencies, pressure-testing AI / ML algorithms and generating data to train and validate their performance, and optimizing network components and characterizing new systems.
Overcoming these challenges requires high-performance design and test solutions that consistently produce reliable results, along with support from a responsive test partner with deep measurement expertise and extensive industry experience.
Collaborative efforts in 6G research and development are paving the way for groundbreaking advancements in wireless technology. By uniting industry leaders, academic institutions, and government agencies, we are collectively driving innovation and overcoming challenges to realize the full potential of 6G. These partnerships are not only enhancing connectivity but also transforming our digital landscape, ensuring a sustainable and efficient future. As we continue to explore and develop new technologies, the synergy of collaboration will remain a cornerstone in shaping the next generation of wireless technology in the 6G era.