First newcomers session at TSG#85... more to follow

September 18, 2019

To address the questions that newcomers to 3GPP dare not ask, the 3GPP TSG Chairs have initiated a breakfast time session – held during the Plenary week – where the leaders take new attendees through material on what 3GPP is doing and how it is done. The first 'Newcomer’s orientation session’ was well attended and should be repeated at future TSG meetings.

A few issues came to light in the session, related to the challenges encountered getting a technical proposal through the groups, how the coordination between SA and RAN is organized, on how challenging the 3GPP environment can be for new comers – as well as practical questions on the portal, web site use and meeting registration.

Lifetime achievement award to RAN3 role model

September 14, 2019

The 105th RAN3 meeting in Ljubljana was an important milestone for one of the long-time RAN3 delegates and the whole group, as it marked the last RAN3 meeting for Martin Israelsson, after 20 years of involvement in the group - in a multitude of roles and positions.

Martin is one of the pillars of 3GPP RAN3, ever present since December 1999, as well as being active in the 3GPP RAN Plenary. He has served as RAN3 Chairman from 2001 to 2003, and as RAN3 Vice-Chairman from 2009 to 2017. Martin’s role has been crucial in fostering a cooperative climate through technically solid discussion and, when required, historically accurate explanations of what led to a certain technical decision.

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.

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.