Farewell Message to my Colleagues at Tata Power Strategic Engineering Division - The Journey Beyond

Design and Development

I have enjoyed my tenure here, and I appreciate having had the opportunity to work with such a wonderful team and such challenging projects. Thank you for the support, guidance, and encouragement you have provided me during my time at Tata Power SED. Even though I will miss all of you, but the reality is that all good things come to an end. There is one thing we all will always be proud of, we built systems for a moral Army and Defence Forces of India.

What we achieved in the short frame of time was commendable. It was not possible without the unflinching and steady support as well as total trust in our capabilities. His firm belief that we will be able to deliver an ingenious system that the Indian Defence forces needed was something that was inspiring as well as a source of enormous energy that propelled us to achieve that may be very few could have achieved given the challenges. People like him come once in many centuries and I am proud to have got the opportunity to work under him. I leave with a happy feeling that we were able to design a communications and networking system from scratch that the Indian Defence forces could rely during future hot wars with our western and northern neighbors.

?Some of the best things that I learnt in life may help you to make your life easy:

?First thing was about making decision. As we grow in professional life, we have to make decisions, some of which may be very trivial and others harsh. But they have to be made. Decision making is like lifting a load attached to the end of a stick, the longer you delay them, the longer the length of the stick becomes. As the stick becomes longer the load becomes heavier. A point comes when the load can no longer be lifted. Decisions taken late are as good as not taken.?Decision making has risks and risks can be minimized with experience. But this is a chicken and egg story, you have to start making decisions first, else you will never learn the cost of failure. No one learns by not making a decision. Make a decision, howsoever late it is. You will learn and grow. And you will realize that you will become happier.

?When I was a kid, I use to see my father taking quick decisions, whether it was about admission in a school, or deciding the place where we were to finally settle down, or even about going on long distance drives. Sometimes, I used to feel angry. As I grew up, I realized that Army had taught him to do that. When he used to go out into patrolling duties in the jungles of North east in mid-1960s, he used to keep his gun unlocked, which was against the orders, as it was unsafe. You could accidently shoot your own colleagues. But he used to insist that when the enemy fired on their column, every second lost was costly and lives could be lost. So he decided to go against the orders, much to the annoyance of his superiors. But while his "C Company" survived many deadly ambushes, other "Companies" suffered serious causalities. That is the power of decision making. It saves lives.

Lastly, never be afraid of failures. Failures are indicators that you are on the right track. Learn from them and improve. Improve yourself continuously. Remember, great success always carried risk of great failure. But risks are to be taken, without risk, the work does not move forward.

Goodbye and Best of Luck.

The Journey Beyond

In his book, The Inevitable, Kelly outlines twelve trends that will forever change the ways in which we work, learn and communicate:

• Becoming: Moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions
• Cognifying: Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI that we get from the cloud
• Flowing: Depending on unstoppable streams in real-time for everything
• Screening: Turning all surfaces into screens
• Accessing: Shifting society from one where we own assets, to one where instead we will have access to services at all times.
• Sharing: Collaboration at mass-scale. Kelly writes, “On my imaginary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10.”
• Filtering: Harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires
• Remixing: Unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombining in all possible ways
• Interacting: Immersing ourselves inside our computers to maximize their engagement
• Tracking: Employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers
• Questioning: Promoting good questions is far more valuable than good answers
• Beginning: Constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix

5G and Beyond

As of 2023, 245 operators in 95 countries had launched or soft-launched at least one 3GPP- compliant 5G service(February 2023). 5G’s expanding use in society is widely anticipated to bring significant changes in various sectors, including communications, entertainment, transportation, healthcare, and many others.

To realize new types of communications supporting an advanced future, new data from previously untapped sources, including various phenomena and life activities in the real world as well as any significant contextual and emotional states, need to be collected and shared, all the while ensuring each individual's privacy. Beyond simply increasing the performance of communications, this will require real-time analysis, archiving, and utilization of the huge amounts of data generated.

A Vision of 2030

The search and evaluation of services and use cases that utilize both 5G features such as ultra-high speed, high capacity, ultra-low latency, high reliability, and massive connectivity, as well as Private 5G features such as safety, stability, and flexibility, has begun. A wide range of solutions are being developed and studied to solve issues that both companies and communities face.

An “inclusive society” is coming where we can attain self-expression through one’s work; rich communication that transcends time, space, language, and generations; and the sharing of knowledge, as well as fostering empathy. In such a society, for example, a child or elderly person confined to a hospital for a long time could converse with family as though they were there in person and recover without social isolation. More people could feel emotionally enriched in their daily lives.

Furthermore, global observation data obtained from satellites and space stations, as well as large amounts of social activity data collected on a global scale, will provide continuous input for policies as well as the business activities of corporations. AI will provide awareness of global-scale phenomena such as global warming, abnormal weather, forest destruction, ocean contamination, and tectonic changes. It will also provide early warning of disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, or wildfires and provide support for a broader transportation system that three-dimensionally covers land, sea, and sky with vehicles such as flying cars, in order to avoid such disasters.

In an area where disaster is anticipated, it could show areas expected to flood in real space using 3D artificial and virtual reality (AR/VR) technology. A distributed, cloud-based remote medical system could provide support, autonomously focusing resources in specific areas. Citizens will be supported by social infrastructure thanks to the communications and peripheral technologies of Beyond 5G / 6G. In a more resilient and sustainable society realized in this way, energy and resource consumption can be minimized while enabling both individual lifestyles and overall optimization. We hope to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions before the 2050 deadline is declared by governments.

By gaining a broad, real-time understanding of all phenomena from micro to macro and from local to global, a sustainable framework will evolve that better harmonizes the earth with the actions of human society, and the living environments and diverse values will also evolve. Cities and infrastructure will be redesigned for a way of life that reflects those values. In this way, we, as part of our ecosystem, can build a sustainable relationship with the earth and a symbiotic world that preserves biodiversity. What kind of communications and related technologies will support such an inclusive society”?

Future Requirements

The future society in 2030 and beyond, people will be able to overcome constraints of their natural abilities through the 5G/ 6G services. For example, telework will be more than simply performing office work through deeper, non-verbal, and other types of communication, giving a feeling of being in the same space, even from a remote location. These types of services will expand to more life scenarios, such as tele-housework, tele-leisure, and tele-adventure. Such abilities will not only be available to people. Robots, automobiles, and AI characters that do not exist in the real world will have such abilities and co-exist with us. In this way, 5G/ 6G will take us beyond human, space, and time.

Using sensors to convey a person’s actions—including their bodily abilities, perceptions, and cognition—through cyberspace to someone at another location so that their thoughts are conveyed without using words or gestures like telepathy. By sharing experiences through mind-to-mind communication with others and including the senses and emotions, barriers between generations would be swept away. Knowledge could be passed from elders to the younger generations, and techniques and know-how could be passed on without loss; the younger generation could also seamlessly share with their elders. They could learn from each other, and people could be connected beyond generations. This ability to foster deeper empathy is another benefit to be gained.

Digital Twin

A technology by which a robot at a remote location acts as a person’s avatar, enabling them to see, feel, and act as though they are at that location. Systems for on-site activities such as sightseeing or watching sports or concerts. Implementation of cyber-physical systems or Internet of Senses reproducing our senses such as touching or feeling textures, tasting, and smelling. For example, customers could enjoy shopping for skin-care products, shirts, jewelry, and other products while experiencing the texture and feel of the products. Then at the same time, with telepresence, an avatar robot could be used to participate in a violin concert being held elsewhere, providing the individual with a healing sensation from the performance by experiencing changes in metabolism, heart rate, and body temperature. This could allow people to enjoy a more luxurious and relaxing holiday.

Beyond Time

With the advance of global-scale networks collecting huge amounts of data in real time and related technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality (XR), we can expect to predict future events more accurately and find solutions to more complex problems than ever before. If we could put on glasses that could predict and show us what will happen 20 or 30 seconds in the future, we might be able to dramatically reduce unexpected accidents. As our use of weather and ocean current data advances, we will more accurately predict harvests of agricultural and fishery products six months or a year in the future and any excesses or shortages by region. Then, we will adjust orders to food companies and producers accordingly. Such warnings from the future could reveal clues to how we could solve the problems of food supply and hunger.

Looking back into the vast amounts of past data, analyzing past experiences that include people's emotions, and applying the results to future scenarios could have major effects on policies as well as corporate decision-making.

Capabilities Required

Some of the beyond 5G/ 6G features are:

• Ultra-high speed and capacity 10 to 100 times that of 5G
• Ultra-low latency 1/10 that of 5G
• Massive connectivity 10 times that of 5G
• Ultra-low power consumption, 1/100 of current values
• Ultra-safe and reliable (security and fault tolerance)
• Autonomy (Zero-touch operation, optimization)
• Scalability (ultra-coverage through satellite, high-altitude platform stations (HAPS), etc.)

Technologies

Quantitative expansion of 5G involves further enhancement for the ultra-high speed and capacity, ultra-low latency, and massive connectivity of the elements in the 5G network (user equipment (UE), radio units (RU), central unit (CU), distributed units (DU), etc.) is required to reproduce ultra-realism and extended digital twins. Ultra- high reliability and security are also important to ensure the security and safety of the expanded cyber-physical. Ultra-wide-area coverage over the entire Earth space and ultra-low power consumption are also needed.

Requirements for a distributed data processing infrastructure are a network in which bandwidth and latency can be controlled freely to be combined with more diverse sensing methods, and a computing environment that can process sensing data in real time. To capture all kinds of information from the environment as digital data, real-time distributed AI processing and distributed digital twin data processing by using multi-access edge computing (MEC) will be important. Other important means used in capturing digital data from the real world include spatial sensing and object positioning using millimeter-wave, terahertz-wave, and optical fiber communications.

For the control plane and orchestration, integration of distributed processing with the network, as well as advanced optimization and automation, will be needed so that network performance and structure can be adjusted according to the needs of users.

Requirements

• Cell Throughput ->=100 Gbps
• Cell capacity >= 10,000 users
• E2E System Latencies of < 20 usec
• E2E Jitter of < 100 nsec
• BER of < 10^-12
• Availability > 99.9999%
• High speed communications @ >= 800 kmph
• Vertical coverage of >= 12 km
• Ubiquitous coverage @ seas/ oceans, forest, desert, mountains, indoors, multifloor basements

Technical Specifications

• Frounthaul Capacity >= 1 Tbps
• Ultra Massive MIMO (UM-MIMO) Antenna at ORU
• Intelligent ORU with far edge computing

Major Features

Paid Priorisation and Zero-Rating

• Determining when 'paid prioritization' is objectively justifiable in the context of network slices priced per QoS is a major challenge.
• Zero-rating and other commercial practices of sponsored data access are depicted as a shift of the network neutrality issue from application throttling and blocking to zero-rating.

https://www.lightwaveonline.com/network-design/packet-transport/article/16657958/ericsson-and-telstra-successfully-trial-1tbps-optical-link

https://www.espublisher.com/uploads/article_pdf/es8d571.pdf