6G Ambient Intelligence Whitepaper

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Computing and communication technologies have been the most transformative technologies of the last decades, permeating every aspect of our lives and society. These technologies offer unprecedented benefits and their omnipresence has been made possible through making their inherent complexity gradually invisible to end users and their benefits and related gratification thus easily available. Advances in these technologies are reinforcing this trend, enabling further transformation of the human/technology interaction. Where once the user had to adapt to a technology before adopting it, now technology is being defined to adapt to us.

Already today, smartphones and apps can learn and predict users’ behavioral patterns to automate certain prompts and other configurations; cars can automatically adjust the driving mode to the driver, the traffic, weather and road conditions for the safest and most comfortable journey; homes can welcome us as we arrive from work, switching lights and music on; and voice assistants can react to our voice commands. These applications represent the beginnings of a pervasive technological change.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is the ultimate realization of the above trend. A human-centric technology that's purpose-built to seamlessly blend into our lives, anticipating our needs rather than reacting to them, with no or minimal user input. It is built to learn about us, our needs and desires, to deliver the best response to satisfy them, for any intended application. To this end, AmI relies on the collection of data from a potentially wide variety of sources (including sensors, devices, applications, etc.) and the processing, analysis of and learning from these and other data to determine and deliver the best response in the most intuitive form possible to the end user.

Our original 6G Vision already touched upon the convergence between communication and computing in the 6G era. This whitepaper further dives into how we, at MediaTek, envision 6G will make Ambient Intelligence a reality. A number of use cases and the societal impact we anticipate of AmI are described first, along with the KPIs AmI requires. Then we discuss enabling technologies for AmI, including mechanisms for flexible communication, computation, and caching; device collaboration; implications for the 6G protocol stack; physical layer communication technologies; and integrated sensing and communication.