2026 Wang Omni Photonic Base Station

6G mobile communications impose immersive communication demands for higher data rates and massive connectivity, while emerging integrated sensing–computing–intelligence scenarios require base stations to concurrently enhance computing capability, guarantee service latency, and realize sensing. We propose the Omni-Photonic Base Station (Omni-PBS)—a progressive evolutionary architecture that introduces photonic technologies into three functional domains, namely baseband processing, fronthaul transmission, and the RF front-end, and obtains system-level gains through cross-domain co-design. Traditional electronic base stations can hardly satisfy the microsecond-level latency demanded by on-site AI inference under power constraints; digital fronthaul faces an explosive growth in transmission bandwidth brought by large-bandwidth communications; and electronic RF front-ends encounter device-level physical bottlenecks in millimeter-wave and terahertz bands. By introducing photonics, Omni-PBS harnesses the inherent physical advantages of ultra-broad bandwidth, ultra-low propagation latency, and native parallelism to transcend the aforementioned electronic bottlenecks and fulfill the compound demands of 6G scenarios. The optical baseband computing domain employs photonic accelerators to perform linear computation-intensive tasks, improving the energy efficiency of AI inference by one to two orders of magnitude. The analog optical fronthaul domain replaces digital fronthaul with analog radio-over-fiber (A-RoF), which eliminates the ADCs/DACs and digital intermediate-frequency (IF) chips in the remote unit and substantially reduces fronthaul bandwidth requirements. The microwave-photonic RF domain breaks through the bandwidth and frequency limitations of electronic RF front-ends via optical true-time-delay (TTD) beamforming, programmable photonic filtering, and optical heterodyne frequency conversion. The three domains yield system-level.