FCC TAC Working Groups Report Progress Toward Final Reports

TAC Chairman Dean Brenner, a former Qualcomm executive, said TAC’s work is critical to U.S. competitiveness. “The world is not waiting for the United States to wake up and begin working on 6G,” Brenner said: “Every day, we see numerous efforts all over the world on 6G moving forward. In North America, the private sector has begun working on 6G, but they can't do it alone.” Industry has learned from previous generations of wireless that “getting all the relevant players to the table upfront, to explore and collaborate on issues is so much better for everyone concerned, especially the public, instead of having to scramble around after the fact,” he said.

The AI/Machine Learning (ML) WG report will start with a recognition that computing will be very important to 6G, but AI doesn’t exist now and is likely “well off into the future,” said Adam Drobot, chairman of OpenTechWorks and WG co-chair. AI “is the ability for programming to be able to deal with problems of general intelligence, real intelligence, be able to surmise things, think things through, and so really it is about understanding at a level of human beings or beyond,” Drobot said: “That is something that does not exist.”

There are many branches of ML, including supervised learning, unsupervised and reinforced, Drobot said. “None of these areas is at a level of maturity where you can say ‘this is dusted, this is done’” and advances are making their way into telecom and other industries, he said. AI and ML aren’t “magic. They have to be mixed with other things, but they are very useful,” he said.

The WG’s report will recommend an FCC pilot project to “really think through the network as a system of systems,” Drobot said: “How do you actually change the regime of how it can be controlled, how it can be managed, how it can be run?”

Sharing Advances

“Several sharing mechanisms have been deployed to enable sharing between federal and nonfederal users, licensed and unlicensed users, or among licensed users,” said Andrew Clegg, co-chair of the Advanced Spectrum Sharing WG. “What are the long-term goals of these approaches?” Clegg asked: “How can artificial intelligence and machine learning and sensing-based radio techniques enhance the effectiveness of sharing mechanisms and optimize network performance?” The WG expects to draw about 20 lessons from what was learned from the citizens broadband radio service band, he said.

Several of the issues raised involve questions in the FCC’s receiver performance notice of inquiry (see 2209020052), said Clegg, who represents the Wireless Innovation Forum. Among these are how state-of-the-art filter technologies can be used to mitigate potential harmful interference and on the use of advanced antenna systems, as well as the costs versus the benefits of receiver controls, he said.

TAC members questioned whether the FCC will impose receiver standards. “If you build a good enough transmitter that has very good transmit filtering, then there is an incentive for you because you get better access to spectrum,” said WG co-Chair Monisha Ghosh, of the Wireless Institute at Notre Dame and former FCC chief technology officer. “There are different ways of doing rules than we do it today,” she said: “Of course with every change of this type that you make the rules become more complicated to not only implement but also to enforce.”

“There’s basically no free lunch,” said Steve Lanning, Viasat vice president-operations. “You need to pay for this stuff.”

The Emerging Technologies WG is taking on a very broad topic, said co-Chair Brian Markwalter, Consumer Electronics Association vice president-technology and standards. “Although the FCC did not say to go look at an efficient use of spectrum, that is clearly an underlying part of what we are doing,” he said. “The question we have not explored yet is, are there emerging technologies that are going to improve accessibility?” he said: “This is a hard problem to solve and there's always work to do there.”