Towards 6G: Network Evolution beyond 5G & Indian Scenario

Arguably, the story of human evolution is going on for lots of years and so is the evolution of technology. With each passing year, people are striving for development and higher fantastic of life. As part of improvement in wireless communication, data rates have been increased with every successive generation of wireless telephony from 384kbps in 2G to 56Mbps in 3G, 1Gbps in 4G and 20 Gbps in 5G. Humans are also looking for multiple other services, such as enhanced high speed mobile broadband, virtual reality, augmented reality, mix reality, automated driving, and next generation Internet of Things (IoT). 5G has been able to take care of all these requirements and provides a lean and ultra-agile design of communication networks. However, taking into account the ever rising demand for new requirements and data dependent human society, it makes sense to move towards the next generation and prepare vision beyond 5G, designing an innovative 6G substrate which will include latest ground-breaking technologies and designs to satisfy new data and connectivity based aspirations of individuals, businesses and societies. Idea of this paper is to provide deep insight into the services, enablers, use cases and technologies of 6G and also motivate researchers to work towards 6G cellular mobile communication network. As a start point gap analysis of 5G is carried out in comparison to 6G, aspirations in relation to data rates, connectivity are taken and a new design is proposed with future use cases. As seen with 5G networks, a technology requires a blend and fusion with other leading technologies of future like 6G will be amalgamated with path breaking technologies like holographic communications, high-precision manufacturing, a fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT / IoMT, and the integration of new technologies, such as visible light communication (VLC) or sub-terahertz, in a truly real 3D coverage scenario. Framework proposed for 6G has to be heterogeneous in nature and will be integrating Satellite, terrestrial and aerial radio access points (UAVs) to form a network with responsive cloud functionalities and thus providing services on the go as well as on demand.