3GPP Standards Meeting - Focus on 6G
The AccelerComm team has just returned from a busy few days at the 3GPP standards meeting in Prague. As we discussed in our previous blog looking at NTN standards 3GPP standards have been a foundational building block of the success of the mobile industry, delivering a global market with broad innovation, but also a choice of suppliers, economies of scale and guaranteed interoperability. As 3GPP progresses towards laying the foundations for 6G we thought it would be interesting to provide a little more detail on the process, its status and AccelerComm’s role within it.
The process
When you look at a 3GPP specification they are very formal documents, written in dry language which somewhat belies the nature of the work that goes into them. Each revision of the standards has to fulfil the dual role of pushing the boundaries of what is possible, whilst also ensuring that the system will actually work, and can be built in a way that is commercially viable. Ensuring that all of these requirements are met requires an enormous amount of detailed rigorous technical work from contributors, with even minor wording choices potentially carrying significant technical implications.
Alongside all the technical detail and rigour, many compromises are required. Openness, transparency, clarity and diplomacy are required from the participants in order to achieve the fine balance of performance and commercial viability that is needed for success. All of this negotiation is being done between companies that are competitors, so it is remarkable how quickly consensus can be built. During the meeting in Prague significant progress was made on a wide range of topics.
Focus on 6G
Much of 3GPPs work is now looking at 6G. At AccelerComm our specific focus within this is the physical layer aspects so we were contributing to a number of key topics, and there is one compromise that runs through all of them. 6G has to be a meaningful step forward from 5G, but wholesale changes will have significant costs to implement, which are bad for the industry and ultimately bad for consumers. The goal is to seek evolutions that provide the required uplift in performance while also protecting existing investment. No easy task. Some of the key elements we have been looking at are:
Channel coding for 6G: What is the target throughput for 6G and can this be achieved by adapting the existing channel codes or do we need completely new codes?
Modulation for 6G: We have seen 5G evolve through 256 QAM into 1024 QAM where do we go next to improve both throughput and resilience? This is an area that will require extensive technical study and simulation to understand what real benefits advanced modulation techniques such as constellation shaping can bring. In order for this work to get started the evaluation frameworks need to be agreed so we will have meaningful comparisons.
Waveform design for 6G: There are many candidates at this stage so the first step is to agree the criteria for selecting a shortlist for further study.
AI/ML: It is clear that these new technologies will play a major role in 6G, but at the moment it is not clear exactly which aspects will deliver the most benefit. This is another case where agreeing the criteria to create a short list for evaluation is a critical first step.
Looking to the skies
On the NTN front the focus is on completing the 5G work in release 19, the current phase of a multi release approach that started in release 17 and has taken us from basic NTN connectivity to enabling advanced use cases with sophisticated regenerative constellations. We shared an overview of this work in our Webinar earlier this year..
6G NTN is expected to build on all of this work and continue the evolution to a truly ubiquitous and seamless connected experience for everyone. We can’t wait to continue to collaborate with our colleagues across the world to bring this vision to reality.
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Stephen Orr
accelercom@temono.com
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