Ericsson has set up an ‘India 6G’ research team in its R&D Center in Chennai to supplement its global efforts to develop 6G technologies.
The India 6G team – which comprises experienced researchers across radio, networks, AI and cloud – will collaborate with Ericsson research teams in Sweden and the US, to develop 6G technology solutions.
Among other things, the India 6G team will be working on channel modelling and hybrid beamforming; low energy networks; cloud evolution and sustainable compute; trustworthy, explainable and bias-free ai algorithms; autonomous agents for intent management functions; integrated sensing and communication functions for man-machine continuum and compute offload to edge-computing cloud.
Ericsson is also partnering with a number of research institutes in India on related technologies, particularly the AI aspect, which is essential to automating 6G networks. Last month, Ericsson signed a five-year partnership deal with the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI), run by Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
The Ericsson announcement followed comments by India Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday at the 7th India Mobile Congress in New Delhi that India intends to be a global leader in 6G technology development, according to the Business Standard.
“Our views on 6G are aligned with the views of ubiquitous connectivity, sustainable networks and affordable communications from Bharat 6G vision statement of the Government of India,” said Nitin Bansal, head of Ericsson India.
India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has been laying the groundwork for 6G development under the ‘Bharat 6G’ programme since 2021, with the aim of making sure India-specific requirements (summed up as affordability, sustainability and ubiquitous connectivity and intelligence) are included in the global IMT-2030 6G standard that eventually emerges from the International Telecommunication Union around 2030.
The ITU completed its 6G Framework in June 2023. The DoT said that it had successfully lobbied the ITU to include ubiquitous connectivity, ubiquitous intelligence and sustainability as key elements of 6G.
India also wants its homegrown intellectual property included in the 6G standard. In July this year, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw told reporters that India had already obtained “over 200 patents” for 6G technology from international organisations.
