The Mobile
Broadband Standard
RAN Rel-16 progress and Rel-17 potential work areas
July 18, 2019
In a recent 3GPP webinar, Balazs Bertenyi – the TSG RAN Chair - discussed the current and future priorities for the radio groups.
Although the webinar is intended for people with some knowledge of how 3GPP functions and of the various working group’s working methods, we do hope that it could also be of interest to non-3GPP experts and other enthusiasts too.
Buried in the presentation are some important details of the work areas being considered by RAN – for Release 17. Balazs gives us an explanation why Release 17 will probably be on the ‘short’ side, spanning a mere 15 months. There is also a hint that the next release will complete some very important pre-normative studies on 5G NR in spectrum above 60GHz. He also gets modest on 3GPP’s impact on the future of AI.
3GPP SA6 accelerates work on new verticals!
June 7, 2019
By Suresh Chitturi, 3GPP Working Group SA6 Chair, Samsung.
Following the modification of the group’s Terms of Reference (ToR) in 2017, 3GPP SA6 Working Group has gradually expanded its activities. While mission-critical applications are still very much central to the SA6 charter, fresh initiatives - since the beginning of Release 15 work - are paving the way for the standardization of new vertical applications within the 3GPP ecosystem, and also promoting the adoption of 3GPP 5G technology across a variety of industries.
New CT Chair looks to boost cooperation
April 26, 2019
Lionel Morand is the new Chair of 3GPP Core Network and Terminals (CT) Technical Specification Group (TSG). In taking up this new leadership post, he will relinquish Chairmanship of the CT4 Working Group – a role he has occupied since July 2016.
In this short interview, we ask for his thoughts on the progress made in TSG CT and the prospects for 5G Core protocol work.
ETSI NFV and 3GPP 5G
July 1, 2019
A Press Release, from ETSI, emphasizes the role of NFV in addressing the variety of applications expected to run on top of the 5G system. It looks also at how ETSI’s NFV ISG work to support network slicing, including ‘Management over multi-administrative domains’ (GS NFV-IFA 030) and ‘Multi-site network connectivity’ (GS NFV-IFA 032), is helping the 3GPP management system to interact with the NFV MANO system - for resource management of the virtualized 5G network.
One of the highlights of ETSI NFV Release 3 is set to be the work on defining an external touchpoint between the NFV’s Network Service and network slicing (GR NFV-IFA 024) - in which the Network Service becomes a composite element of the 3GPP SA5 working group’s network slice subnet construct (TS 28.530) – intended to allow implementations to easily combine the 3GPP Network Resource Model (NRM) with the ETSI NFV Information Model.
Early progress on Rel-16 bands for 5G
April 2, 2019
By Xutao Zhou, Samsung, 3GPP RAN4 Chairman
- RAN Working Group 4 has been focusing on ensuring the stability and compatibility of the Release 15 specifications as it draws to a successful completion. Now, the focus shifts to work on Release16, where RAN4 has made tremendous early progress on new 5G NR bands and band combinations.
Due to practical reasons the Release 16 version of RAN4 specifications will only be created in June 2019 RAN Plenary. In the meantime, the completed Release 16 band specifications are maintained in RAN4 as a set of endorsed Change Requests. Note that band specifications have always been release independent. Consequently, from a specification perspective Release 16 NR bands and combinations can be supported by Release15 User Equipment (UE) and network.
Search and download specs, docs, CRs and more from the 3GPP FTP Server:
Webinar on RAN Rel-16 progress and Rel-17 work area discussions
3GPP SA6 work on new verticals
Early progress on Rel-16 bands for 5G
New CT Chair looks to boost cooperation