In my fellowship i have been working to support the challenge of native integration of AI in the context of communication networks. While much success has been achieved in addressing network use cases with intelligent technologies, this has predominantly been applied in a case by case basis, with resulting outputs added to the networks in an ad-hoc way. Instead, AI-native networks are envisioned to accommodate the ubiquitous and native deployment of AI-based solutions in the network. Through the work of the ITU-T Focus Group on AI-Native Networks, I contributed to the elaboration of use case, and associated requirements. I have also been supporting on the analysis of relevant key technologies that are required to realise the requirements derived from the use cases.
Country
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)
Impact on SMEs (9th Open Call)
AI-native networks are set to increase the amount of automated operation within our networks, making them more scalable and resilient and decreasing OPEX. From a consumer perspective, this will translate to more reliable service operation at a lower cost.
Impact on society (9th Open Call)
Integration of AI in the management and operation of telecommunication networks, supports increased automation, reducing the operational expenditure and increasing the reliability of their operation. Together, this supports cheaper, more resilient, and high quality critical national infrastructure for society that relies on such networks for entertainment, maintain societal bonds, education, emergency support, and commerce. In this way, this work in-directly supports this by supporting standardisation that eases the integration of AI in networks.
This was a one-shot contribution to provide travel support for participation to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and specifically participation at the July 2025 plenary meeting in Madrid. I attended this meeting as an Internet Transport expert contributing work and progressing standards to support the evolution of the Internet and its support for enhanced resilience, authentication and privacy. An in-person attendance at the technical sessions also allowed me to progress the work for which I am an editor: Qlog draft-ietf-tsvwg-careful-resume-qlog, a transport specification based on the “qlog” specification being developed by the IETF QUIC; and a recent work item in the IETF Congestion Control working group, “Increase of the Congestion Window when the Sender Is Rate-Limited” (draft-ietf-ccwg-ratelimited-increase). In-person participation at this meeting is particularly important in my current role as an Area Director of the WIT Area, where I will help organise and oversee the meeting as a whole and specifically support the WIT area WG chairs in organising WG sessions and supporting cross area review of emerging specifications.
Country
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)
Development of new IETF secure and resilient standards are important for a digital society. Since the last IETF plenary meeting 74 documents had been approved for publication in the last quarter and 83 RFCs had been published. Two new IAB workshops were announced: Joint
IAB/W3C Workshop on Age-Based Restrictions on Content Access and an IAB Workshop on IP Geolocation. The importance of standards was evident in serval meetings co-located with IETF-123. This including meetings with policy and regulators, a meeting on Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Internet Standards Deployment accompanied by an IEPG presentation by Rüdiger Martin of the Internet Governance Team from DG-CNECT, EU. This outlines plans around NIS2, and sought to develop understanding of challenges and barriers, provide timelines for deployments of protocols at scale and best current practice. The transport system is primarily concerned with robustness and resilience to disruption of the Internet service. IETF participants had various insights into the roll-out of new standards and the implications of the new regulatory landscape.
Impact on society (9th Open Call)
The IETF is the principal Internet SDO. IETF standards and guidelines are important to Broadband Infrastructure, ensuring resilience and security of Internet data.
The standards published by the IETF define the software, protocols, and practices implemented by equipment vendors and operators. When adopted by industry, these standards will be deployed by international companies such as Apple, Google, Meta, Cloudflare and others. Specifications in the working groups for which I am the responsible Area Director include: Differentiated Services, new transport protocol mechanisms and the effects of pervasive encryption, protocol design, network infrastructure operation. It is important that new specifications consider user privacy, security, resilience and robustness to build the next generation of Internet applications and service.
5G brings the need to support different kinds of UEs (e.g., for the Internet of Things (IoT), services, and technologies is driving the technology revolution to a high-performance and highly efficient 3GPP system. The drivers include IoT, Virtual Reality (VR), industrial control, ubiquitous on-demand coverage, as well as the opportunity to meet customized market needs. These drivers require enhancements to the devices, services, and technologies well established by 3GPP. The key objective with the 5G system is to be able to support new deployment scenarios across diverse market segments.
The present document specifies the protocol conformance testing for the 3GPP UE connecting to the 5G System (5GS) via its radio interface(s). The following information can be found in the present document (first part of a multi-part test specification): - the overall test structure; - the test configurations; - the conformance requirement and references to the core specifications; - the test purposes; and - a brief description of the test procedure, the specific test requirements and short message exchange table. The applicability of the individual test cases is specified in the ICS proforma specification (3GPP TS 38.523-2 [2]). The Test Suites are specified in part 3 (3GPP TS 38.523-3 [3]). The present document is valid for UE implemented according to 3GPP Releases starting from Release 15 up to the Release indicated on the cover page of the present document.
Mobile and fixed networks are evolving towards ultra-broadband and, with 5G, are going to converge. The use of much broader frequency ranges, up to 60 GHz, where radio propagation is an issue, is going to impact the network deployment topologies. In particular, the use of higher frequencies and the need to cover hot/black spots and indoor locations, will make it necessary to deploy much denser amount of radio nodes. 5G is introducing major improvements on Massive MIMO, IoT, low latency, unlicensed spectrum, and with V2x for the vehicular market. Support of some of these services will have a relevant effect on the power ratings and the energy consumption at the radio base station. A major new service area of 5G impacting the powering and backup will be the URLLC (Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication) as its support will increase the service availability demands by many orders of magnitude. Supporting such high availability goals will be partly reached through redundant network coverage, but a main support will have to come through newly designed powering architectures. This will be made even more challenging as 5G will require the widespread introduction of distributed small cells. ETSI TS 110 174-2-2 [i.5] analyses the implications and indicates possible solutions to fulfil such high demanding availability goals. There is a need to define sustainable and smart powering solutions, able to adapt to the present mobile network technologies and able to evolve to adapt to their evolution. The flexibility would be needed at level of power interface, power consumption, architecture tolerant to power delivery point changes and including control-monitoring. This means that it should include from the beginning appropriate modularity and reconfiguration features for local powering and energy storage and for remote powering solutions including power lines sizing, input and output conversion power and scalable sources. The present document was developed jointly by ETSI TC EE and ITU-T Study Group 5. It is published respectively by ITU and ETSI as Recommendation ITU-T L.1210 [i.7] and ETSI ES 203 700 (the present document), which are technically-equivalent.
SCOPE: The present document defines the Stage 2 system architecture for the 5G System. The 5G System provides data connectivity and services. This specification covers both roaming and non-roaming scenarios in all aspects, including interworking between 5GS and EPS, mobility within 5GS, QoS, policy control and charging, authentication and in general 5G System wide features e.g. SMS, Location Services, Emergency Services.
The EMTEL Special Committee is responsible for the capture of European requirements concerning emergency communication services, covering typically the four scenarios in case of an emergency e.g. communication of citizens with authorities, from authorities to citizens, between authorities and amongst citizens. In addition, EMTEL deals with topics like location (e.g. Advanced Mobile Location), NG112, communications involving IoT devices in emergency situations and alerting.
The document aims at providing recommendations for the introduction of autonomics (management and control intelligence) in the 3GPP Core and Backhaul network architectures. To this effect, it covers the instantiation of the reference model for Autonomic Networking, Cognition and Self-Management, called GANA (Generic Autonomic Networking Architecture), onto the architecture defined in ETSI TS 123 401 and ETSI TS 123 402. It superimposes GANA Decision Elements (DEs) into node/device architectures and the overall 3GPP network architecture, so that the DEs and their associated Control-Loops can be further designed to perform autonomic management and control of the specific resources (Managed Entities) in the target architecture. It develops recommendations on the basic behaviours of the GANA Functional Blocks (FBs) in the above context. 3GPP specifications on policy control (ETSI TS 123 203) and network management (TS 123 32x series) are taken into account into the working reference architecture. It also involves the backhaul network and associated interactions between the different entities for an optimization with an end-to-end perspective.
SCOPE: The present document covers the Radio Access Architecture and Interface aspects of the study item “New Radio Access Technology” [1]. The purpose of this TR is to record the discussion and agreements that arise in the specification of the “New Radio Access Technology” from an Access Architecture and Interface specification point of view.
