Description
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is an association of several of the world's largest telecommunications standardisation bodies, including the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, ETSI.
The 3GPP is one of the principal bodies in defining and documenting the development of the fifth generation of mobile telecommunications standards, or 5G. An expedited standardisation process has begun within 3GPP to enable the delivery of the 5G standardisation in two phases; Release 15 incorporating early 5G deployments by 2020 for Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and, Release 16 to target the full ITU-2020 submission covering all use cases including massive machine type communications (mMTC) and Ultra reliable low latency communications (ULLC). Based on a combined effort by the satellite industry, a study item covering the 5G satellite component extension to terrestrial use cases was approvedby the 3GPP in June 2016 (3GPP TR22.891) identifying SMARTER use cases supported by satellite for the delivery of multimedia, broadband, machine type, critical and vehicular communications.
The objective of the proposed activity is to help develop contributions and advocate positions favourable to the satellite communications sector, and specifically to ARTES participating-state industry, within the 3GPP process. Work on Release 16 will begin in March 2017 and will address all requirements and use cases, including a New Radio (NR) interface -waveform suitable for satellite usage and Layer 2/3 protocol compatibility with satellite.
The activity shall:
a) identify existing (and if necessary propose new) 3GPP work items that that are of direct relevance to the Satcom sector,
b) prepare and promote harmonized contributions to the 3GPP Radio Access Network (RAN) and Services and System Aspects (SA) groups,
c) establish an agile framework in which tasks can be quickly initiated and executed in support of specific work items on performance analysis and associated methodologies,
d) establish a mechanism to obtain feedback from representatives of ARTES industry and satellite operators to steer the contributions.