Our lives today are more interconnected than ever, thanks to intelligent devices and ubiquitous wireless access to the cloud. From voice calls and broadband access on our smartphones and laptops, to connected cars and a myriad of IoT devices, wireless connectivity has become the backbone of modern innovation. As we look to the future, the advancements of wireless technology will be crucial for our increasingly connected society, and we firmly believe in the value that can be created with on-device intelligence at the edge, where users can directly experience the benefits.
As the global head of wireless research at Qualcomm Technologies, I am proud to be part of a team dedicated to continuously innovating enhanced wireless experiences, improving system efficiency, and connecting new wireless devices and services. That’s why we're thrilled to return to Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona, where we will showcase our latest wireless innovations.
Visit us at our booth in Hall 3, Stand 3E10, to experience our cutting-edge technology demonstrations in person. If you can't make it to Barcelona, don't miss out — explore our virtual showroom from anywhere.
For the rest of the blog post, let me highlight our key research directions to bring in the next era of wireless connectivity.
At Qualcomm Technologies, we are exploring new technology frontiers and breaking barriers to fully enable our vision of intelligent computing everywhere. From 5G Advanced and 6G to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, UWB and beyond, we're driving foundational advancements to meet the connectivity demands of tomorrow.
Foundational wireless evolution
As we continue our journey to unlock the true potential of wireless technology, our focus remains on strengthening the foundational elements of the wireless system. We often call this research direction the “evolutionary” path, where we build upon the strong system design already in place to achieve even greater performance and efficiency. This year, we focused on two of the most fundamental wireless network capabilities — coverage and capacity.
Driving toward ubiquitous connectivity
Improving coverage is one of the most important areas of our ongoing wireless research. Today, networks deployed in the lower-band spectrum, typically below 1 GHz and between 1 and 2 GHz, have the broadest coverage as signals propagate well in free space and through obstructions. However, these FDD and lower TDD bands are intrinsically limited in bandwidth. With 6G on the horizon, we are presented with an invaluable opportunity to redesign the air interface to introduce new techniques that can boost spectral efficiency and can improve coverage across all bands.
Beyond enhancing terrestrial networks, we are also evolving 5G satellite (also referred to as non-terrestrial network, or NTN) technology to bridge the coverage gap in remote areas and over the oceans. Integrating terrestrial and satellite networks in a seamless manner can ensure continuous coverage. Imagine a car or an IoT device traveling from an urban city into suburban and rural areas. Satellite coverage can ensure continuous connectivity, delivering valuable information and services along the way.
Watch the lower-band spectrum design demo ⯈
Watch the 5G NTN evolution demo ⯈
Expanding capacity to meet future data demand
As we evolve our wireless networks to support more users, devices and services, the demand for more capacity is apparent. Beyond efforts to improve spectral efficiency in existing bands, we are also evolving MIMO system designs to support new spectrum in the upper midband (i.e., 7-15 GHz). This new “FR3” band can deliver ~400 MHz of new wide-area bandwidth. Our advanced simulations and over-the-air testing of the FR3 Giga-MIMO system achieved significant throughput gain and coverage comparable to sub-7 GHz. Our focus remains on working with spectrum regulators and industry leaders to make this band ready for 6G.
Inside data centers, the demand for hyper-local connectivity is growing rapidly to meet increasing cloud computing needs. Introducing wireless connectivity within data centers to complement existing fiber optic links can offer benefits. For example, mmWave (24 GHz and above) and sub-THz (100 GHz and above) spectrum can provide significant additional capacity, with the directionality and agility needed to address changing demands.
Watch the Super-QAM in FR3 demo ⯈
Watch the wireless data center demo ⯈
Wireless operational optimization
Equally important to pushing the technology boundaries for headline wireless performance is achieving new levels of end-to-end system efficiency. These optimization challenges are often complex and require predictive and real-time solutions, making them increasingly complex as wireless systems become more sophisticated. By leveraging technology advancements like digital twins and artificial intelligence (AI), we are expanding our innovation toolkit to address these challenges.
Capitalizing on wireless adaptive intelligence
There is no doubt that the rise of AI is transforming our world, unlocking new experiences and use cases. In the world of wireless technology, AI has the potential to revolutionize systems design and operation.
Our 6G vision is an AI-native system where AI is seamlessly integrated across multiple layers of the network and within devices. Future networks are expected to learn and adapt over time, using AI-native protocols that can enable the network to dynamically adjust its parameters based on real-time conditions, such as traffic load, user mobility and interference levels. This enables optimized performance for each individual user, application and device.
To achieve this vision, a key research focus is on how AI in both the network and devices can collaborate to deliver tangible system benefits. That work has already begun with the design of two-sided AI-enhanced channel state feedback (CSF) in 5G Advanced. We are working closely with industry leaders like Nokia Bell Labs and Rohde & Schwarz to demonstrate the benefits and scalability of this new AI-enhanced air interface design.
In addition to our prototyping efforts to better understand the potential benefits of wireless AI, we are also evaluating the practicality of various approaches. For instance, we anticipated and validated that wireless AI can deliver meaningful gains even when models are not trained at every possible location. However, to achieve enhanced performance, maintaining multiple, localized models can help. This makes wireless AI model lifecycle management crucial for efficient model switching and on-device adaptation to maximize system performance.
Watch the AI-native system design demo ⯈
Watch the AI model life cycle management demo ⯈
Watch the AI-enhanced wireless efficiency demo ⯈
Watch the wireless AI performance verification demo ⯈
Realizing real-time system efficiency
A digital twin of a physical wireless network can be leveraged to empower informed decision-making, playing a crucial role in optimizing end-to-end system performance and operational efficiency.
One potential use case is enhancing the provisioning and performance of network slicing for low-latency applications with a high-fidelity network digital twin. Our O-RAN-based service management and orchestration (SMO) solution combines a digital twin service and AI and interfaces with RAN automation to evaluate, create and manage network slices at scale with data-driven KPI predictions.
The applicability of digital twins also extends to wireless radio operations. Our research is exploring its impact for analog beamforming performance in massive MIMO deployments. Our demonstration shows two main modes of operations — user-distribution-aware beamforming with a semi-static codebook and user-specific, dynamic beamforming for even finer levels of customization and a more responsive network. Our demonstration provides a peek into the future of RAN automation, such as with our Qualcomm Dragonwing RAN Automation Suite.
Watch the network slicing with digital twins and GenAI demo ⯈
Watch the digital twin-assisted analog beamforming demo ⯈
Emerging wireless services
We are committed to expanding wireless connectivity into new devices and services, unlocking opportunities for the broader ecosystem. The convergence of wireless connectivity, low-power computing and on-device intelligence can present new technological challenges, and we are taking an end-to-end view of the full system to address them.
Enabling immersive communications at scale
We are laying the foundation for next-generation mobile experiences with extended reality (XR) at the forefront. Delivering high-fidelity, immersive communication at scale requires novel distributed spatial computing architectures. To make the future of immersive communications a reality, we are working with infrastructure providers, device manufacturers and software vendors. This work harnesses on-device and edge cloud processing, connected by low-latency wireless communications.
Watch the immersive experiences with distributed spatial computing demo ⯈
Integrating wireless sensing with communications
Leveraging existing wireless infrastructure for purposes beyond communication is an exciting frontier. Integrated sensing uses RF to detect objects and movements. One leading use case is enhancing wireless communications by gaining a deeper understanding of the environment, such as the blockage locations. This approach can achieve important benefits, like device power savings with reduced overhead exchanges. For our demonstration, we're using real-time raytracing to create a high-fidelity digital twin of the environment.
Beyond communications, wireless sensing can also open up new possibilities for system monitoring such as aerial drone detection. Our research focuses on reliably detecting and tracking drones in real-time.
Watch the sensing-enhanced communication demo ⯈
Watch the wireless sensing for aerial drone detection demo ⯈
Continuing the wireless technology evolution towards 6G. Click to enlarge image.
What’s next?
At Qualcomm Technologies, we are excited to drive the continued advancement of wireless. 2025 will be a momentous year, marking the official beginning of 6G standardization. In fact, we will be attending the 3GPP 6G RAN Plenary Workshop in Seoul, South Korea, the week following MWC Barcelona. We anticipate a lot of challenging and exciting work ahead, with the potential to transform our world. I look forward to connecting with you at Mobile World Congress Barcelona and encourage you to stay tuned for more exciting updates.
Learn more about the future of wireless technology at our new 6G website
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