A Public Lecture by Morio Toyoshima, Director General of the Wireless Networks Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

Research and development of Non-Terrestrial Networks for Beyond 5G and 6G is actively conducted to realize an advanced information and communication network that seamlessly connects the ground and space. NTN's features include the scalability and wideness of its coverage area, with seamless connection and communication services to digitally divided areas such as sea, mountainous areas, and the sky that cannot be covered by terrestrial systems. In areas that will be expanded by NTN, various uses are expected, such as communication to space, the moon, and underwater, backhaul links to remote base stations and portable base stations, air mobility such as drones and flying cars, communication to connected cars, high-capacity communication to aircraft and ships, and Internet of Things such as fleet management. Space laser communications will be a solution to provide the high-capacity wireless communications network in B5G and 6G era. In this talk the global trends of space optical communications for Beyond 5G/6G as well as future challenges are introduced.

Morio Toyoshima is Director General of the Wireless Networks Research Center in NICT. He received his Ph.D. in electronic engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2003. He joined the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications) in 1994 and shortly after was engaged in research for the Engineering Test Satellite VI (ETS-VI) optical communication experiment. He joined the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA; formerly, NASDA) to assist in the development of the Optical Inter-orbit Communications Engineering Test Satellite (OICETS) from 1999 to 2003. He spent one year as a guest scientist at Vienna University of Technology, Austria in 2004. In April 2006, he returned to NICT, where he performed ground-to-OICETS laser communication experiments in 2006. He was involved in the development of the Small Optical TrAnsponder (SOTA) for 50-kg-class satellites and conducted the satellite-to ground quantum communication experiments. He was also involved in the development of the communication payloads for the Engineering Test Satellite 9 (ETS-9).