Nokia and DOCOMO have a long history of pioneering research that has brought new wireless technologies to life. Starting with 3G in the 1990s, through 4G, and up to today's 5G, including their collaboration on the 5G O-RAN, the companies have turned ideas into implementations and pushed the boundaries to create optimized experiences for end users.

Nokia believes that 6G will not only build upon existing technologies and systems, but will expand and transform what a network can do. It will merge the human, physical, and digital worlds to unleash our innate human potential. To achieve this, Nokia has envisioned six key technologies that will be vital components of future 6G networks. These include new spectrum technologies, AI-native air interface, the network as a sensor, extreme connectivity, cognitive, automated, and specialized architectures, and security and trust.

Among the six key technology components, the partnership's initial focus is demonstrating the benefits of AI-based waveform learning in the transmitter with a deep learning receiver in the mid-band, as well as testing high-speed indoor data communications in the sub-THz band. These technologies have the potential to substantially improve deployment flexibility and increase network throughput beyond 5G in their respective spectrum bands without necessarily increasing power consumption. Providing high-speed access will be important for enabling enhanced and new use cases in the 6G era, such as multimodal mixed-reality telepresence and remote collaboration, mass twinning, and collaborative robots.

The plan is to establish environments for experiments and demonstrations at DOCOMO and NTT's facilities in Japan and at Nokia's facilities in Stuttgart, Germany, and to begin conducting the desired tests and measurements in 2022.