Motivated by International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-2030, sixth generation (6G) mobile networks in 3GPP (third-generation partner project) commenced with a workshop in March 2025, attracting more than 200 contributions and 700 in-person attendances. While the details of 6G study and the eventual 6G specifications in 3GPP are yet to be developed, there is strong motivation in 3GPP to focus on the fundamental values that 6G may bring, most notably in terms of improving user experience and the overall network operation, particularly with respect to reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). It is evident that there is a strong need to streamline and simplify the 6G specifications for efficient standardization, implementation, and commercial deployments. For the services also accommodated by the fifth generation (5G) networks, 6G is expected to provide meaningful enhancements. That is, instead of simply pushing for even higher envelopes such as peak data rates, more emphasis will be on improved coverage (especially at the cell edge and for certain data rates or services), and energy efficiency (for both end devices and networks) using the existing and new spectrum. Moreover, 6G is expected to support new services, with artificial intelligence (AI) and sensing as two primary examples. In this article, we provide a tutorial on the key technologies driving fundamental enhancements for the standardization of 6G and beyond, covering the necessary co-existence between 5G and 6G for smooth migration, AI-native radio access network (RAN), multiple-input-multiple-out (MIMO), sustainable operation with increased energy efficiency, coverage enhancements involving both terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks (NTN), integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), diverse device types including the low-end back-scattering based ambient internet of things (IoT) devices, and native support of NTN. We conclude this article by pointing out several key challenges and opportunities towards standardization of 6G and beyond.
Hyperspectral band selection methods based on differentiable selectors can be sensitive to initialization and to extracting a final discrete subset, while prescribed band counts limit flexibility. We propose SGBR-HC (Spectral-Group Band Ranking with Hard-Concrete initialization), a two-stage method that uses a supervised spectral ranking to initialize trainable sparse gates rather than treating ranking as a fixed selection rule, letting the number of selected bands be determined by training. Stage-1 scores candidate bands from training pixels by class discriminability and spectral diversity; this ranking seeds the gate logits for Stage-2, which trains the sparse gates jointly with a spatial classifier. Under spatially disjoint evaluation on Pavia University and Houston 2013, verified by retraining a fresh classifier on the selected bands, SGBR-HC achieves the highest mean overall accuracy and Cohen's kappa with approximately twenty bands. Bypassing Stage-1 degrades OA by 8.84 pp on Pavia University and 22.15 pp on Houston 2013, confirming the ranking prior's role. Random pixel splits inflate OA on Pavia University by 30.56 pp, underscoring spatial leakage as a critical evaluation confound.
The PROMISE Design Standard and Library is currently being used (and expanded) to develop a very high efficiency, low voltage, high current DC-DC power converter, based on a novel architecture of control, which allows it to be flexible and reconfigurable as a function of application and fault tolerance requirements. This Scalable power source controller IC (SCOPS) is targeted for use in space and satellite applications which require a robust power supply that can deliver the consistent low voltage and high current that is required to drive advanced electronic technologies, all of which are tending towards low voltage operation but which also exhibit very high currents as a function of the numbers of transistors being deployed.
This paper investigates the impact of geomagnetic storms on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). More specifically, Precise Point Positioning (PPP) applications are strongly impacted by this phenomenon. Indeed, in critical geomagnetic conditions, users are no longer able to reach the decimeter level of accuracy expected with this positioning technique. In this study, we analyzed the PPP performances of 4 different IGS stations at different latitudes during the strong geomagnetic storm occurred in mid-October 2024 throughout Solar Cycle 25 high activity. The trends are then compared with the measurement of the Earth's magnetic field in the nearest geomagnetic observatories and evaluated at same time. The results have shown that there is a strong spatial and time correlation between the common geomagnetic indexes and the obtained positioning performance, which opens the way to the development of novel techniques to monitor, detect and mitigate the geomagnetic storms affecting PPP applications.
