Top 10 Technical Keywords After a busy year, what have communication technology people studied?

Editor's noteLooking back at 2023, the digital economy has become the main theme. The rapid development of the digital economy and technological innovation are intertwined, which not only gives birth to many new industries and business formats, but also provides new solutions for the digital transformation of thousands of industries.

This year, technologies have been continuously updated and iterated to empower industrial development: 5G has entered a new stage of 5G-AAIGC was born, and the "big model" was in full bloom;"Mobile phone direct connection to satellite" is out of the circle;Increasing interest in autonomous network technology;The popularity of the new intelligent computing industry continues unabatedTechnologies such as RedCap, 400G, low**, passive IoT, and liquid cooling have attracted much attention ......

Here, the editorial department of Communication World has summarized the most popular in 2023ICT technology "keyword".to look ahead to 2024 from a broad perspective.

5g-a

5G-A (5G-Advanced) is a key stage in the evolution from 5G to 6G, and 5G-A network capabilities such as connection rate and latency are 10 times higher than that of 5G. 2023 is a critical year for the development of international standards for 5G-A. To meet the needs of network evolution, more than 20 operators around the world have rushed to deploy 5G-A. At present, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Beijing, Shanghai and other places have launched diversified 5G-A pilot projects such as glasses-free 3D, IoT, Connected Vehicles, low-altitude, and synaesthesia, taking the lead in exploring 5G-A.

aigc

AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) is an artificial intelligence that starts with 10 era into 2An important sign of the 0 era. As a new type of content production mode, AIGC will promote productivity innovation with the transformation of content production mode, lead the industrial transformation under the wave of digital and real integration, have a profound impact on people's production and lifestyle, and open up a new era of human production interaction. In 2023, the scale of China's AIGC industry will be about 14.3 billion yuan, and it is expected to enter the large-scale model cultivation period in 2024, and continue to build and improve new infrastructure such as the underlying computing power and large-scale model store platform, so as to nurture mature technologies and product forms and export them to the outside world.

Autonomous networks

Autonomous networks are an important part of the new information infrastructure, which aims to build automated and intelligent O&M capabilities throughout the network lifecycle, provide consumers and vertical industry users with new network and ICT services with "zero waiting, zero faults, and zero contact", and build "self-configuration, self-healing, and self-optimization" digital and intelligent O&M capabilities for intelligent network O&M. At present, autonomous networks have been widely used in operators' personal, home broadband, and government and enterprise services, supporting operators to improve quality, increase revenue, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. With the joint promotion of global operators, autonomous networks will fully reach the L3 automation level in 2023 and will enter a new stage of L4 in 2025.

redcap

As the first commercialized and most promising new technology in the 3GPPr17 version, RedCap (Reduced Capability (Lightweight 5G Technology) can inherit 5G's native capabilities to meet the needs of medium- and high-speed IoT scenarios while greatly reducing the cost and power consumption of 5G terminals, and is the technology for the large-scale development of the current 5G industry. In 2023, the industrialization of RedCap will be accelerated, and the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain will carry out a series of work around standards, tests, applications, ecology, etc., to promote the rapid development of the RedCap industry. At present, RedCap base station products have been relatively perfect, and modules, chips, and terminals are also maturing and enriching, and basically have commercial conditions. Under the policy wind, RedCap will enter a stage of rapid development to help China's 5G outperform in the "second half".

400g

400G refers to the transmission technology that can carry 400G services in a single wavelength, and 400G is generally regarded as the next major transformative intergenerational technology of the backbone network, and is expected to become the "optical base" in the era of computing power networks. At present, backbone optical transmission has entered the 400G era. The improvement and maturity of the 400G industry chain provides the possibility for large-scale commercial use of 400G. At the same time, new bands, new devices, and new optical fibers fully support the wide application of 400G transmission technology. 2023 is the first year of 400G development, and the three major operators of China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom have carried out multi-scenario laboratory tests and live network pilots around 400G.

Wise calculations

Intelligent computing refers to intelligent computing, which uses heterogeneous computing resources as the core and is usually used for AI training and inference. Because of its specificity, it has better performance and energy consumption in AI scenarios. From the perspective of market size, the scale of China's artificial intelligence computing power market can reach 66.4 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 825%, the demand for artificial intelligence computing power is growing rapidly. At present, China's intelligent computing industry chain has been initially formed, covering the upstream industry composed of chips, software, and hardware vendors, the midstream industry composed of cloud vendors, telecom operators, third-party data center service providers, etc., and the downstream industry composed of users in the Internet, transportation, finance, industry and other industries.

The phone is directly connected to the satellite

With the rise of "mobile phone directly connected to satellite", the satellite communication market has also entered a new era, and the market prospect is broad. As of the end of July 2023, mobile operators in 42 countries and territories have formed 70 partnerships with satellite** providers. Of these, four partnerships are evaluating, testing or experimenting with Direct-to-Satellite technology, and 16 are planning to launch Direct-to-Satellite applications. In September 2023, China Telecom launched the "mobile phone direct satellite service", which is the first time that a global operator has realized consumer services such as two-way voice calls and SMS sending and receiving between consumer mobile phones and satellites, which means that China Telecom has become the first telecom company in the world to realize the integrated operation of terrestrial cellular network services and satellite network services, and is also the sole operator of the "Tiantong-1" satellite mobile communication system.

Synaesthesia is one

Communication and Sensing Integration (ISAC) refers to a new type of information processing technology based on software and hardware resource sharing or information sharing, and realizes the coordination of sensing and communication functions at the same time, which can effectively improve the system spectrum efficiency, hardware efficiency and information processing efficiency. At present, the integration of communication and perception has become a common expectation of 6G network capabilities around the world. The focus of the next step of research and promotion is to carry out research on synaesthesia-related technical indicators in combination with the key work of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), define deployment scenarios, business models and indicator systems, etc., and promote the formation of international consensusThe second is to carry out the research of synaesthesia integration scheme from the system level, and simultaneously carry out supporting evaluation tests and performance verification, so as to accelerate the mature iteration of synaesthesia integration technology.

Passive IoT

In recent years, the trend of combining passive IoT with cellular networks has attracted more and more attention. Passive Internet of Things (P-IoT) refers to the use of signals emitted by transceiver devices (such as cellular base stations, WiFi routers, TV towers, etc.) widely existing in the surrounding environment as energy** in the field of the Internet of Things, sending RF signals to passive nodes, so that they can obtain enough energy from them, complete data modulation and actively send signals to the receiver, thereby significantly expanding the communication distance. At present, UHF RFID technology has been widely used in retail, logistics, aviation, medical, energy, industry and other fields, and the passive Internet of Things is becoming more and more mature in the domestic industrial ecology, and the application field is constantly extending.

Liquid cooling

With the vigorous development of the digital economy, the power consumption of some equipment has increased several times, and liquid cooling is urgently needed to effectively transfer heat. At the same time, new business formats such as AI large models consume a lot of energy, and the continuous improvement of computing power networks also exacerbates the problem of temperature control, so liquid cooling is needed as a key means to save energy and reduce consumption. In recent years, liquid cooling technology has begun to expand from data centers to energy storage, new energy vehicles and other fields, and the development situation is good. Unlike traditional air cooling, liquid cooling uses liquid instead of air to remove the heat generated during the operation of devices such as CPUs, chipsets, memory modules, and expansion cards. Liquid cooling can dissipate heat from the IT equipment in the data center and enable the normal operation of the data center. China's liquid-cooled data center market is expected to reach 53With a rapid growth of 2%, the market size reached 15.4 billion yuan.