Trade body 5G Americas has published a study, Becoming 5G-Advanced: the 3GPP 2025 Roadmap, which explores major enhancements in Artificial Intelligence, extended reality and beyond in 3GPP Release 18.
“The work done by 3GPP in Release 17 improved 5G New Radio (NR) by adding support for new services, reduced-capability user equipment, non-terrestrial networks, frequency bands beyond 52GHz, and the multicast and broadcast service (MBS),” notes Chris Pearson, President of 5G Americas. “The next few years will see initial work on Release18, the 5G-Advanced standard, which will offer a boost to network performance and create even more opportunities.”
The study provides a detailed background on 3GPP’s work leading into 2025, focusing on the organization’s processes, a review of major enhancements and new vertical applications, an assessment of global market trends and use cases, and a developmental timeline for currently active 3GPP releases. It also covers radio access technologies, highlighting 22 new and enhanced RAN features and capabilities.
Becoming 5G-Advanced: the 3GPP 2025 Roadmap explores:
- Review of 3GPP Rel-17 and 3GPP Rel-18 (5G Advanced)
- Global market trends, new use cases and 3GPP timeline
- Radio access technologies
- System architecture, core networks, and services
- Enhancements for non-public networks, seamless user equipment (UE) context recovery, access traffic steering split & switch, location services (LCS) enhancements, and next generation real time communication (RTC).
“5G-Advanced enhancements will unleash a diversity of new capabilities for fixed/mobile broadband as well as vertical industries powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and full duplex technologies based on a single platform. 5G Advanced Release 18 will set the stage for entirely new possibilities,” advises Yi Huang, Principal Engineer, Qualcomm Technologies.
“Following the successes of 5G in Releases 15 through 17, we expect Release 18 to bring additional technical enhancements in many areas including artificial intelligence and extended reality,” says Karri Kuoppamaki, SVP of Radio Network Technology and Strategy at T-Mobile. “The expected 5G-Advanced features will continue the progress of mobile communications and have a significant impact on future wireless networks. Congratulations to T-Mobile’s Mark Younge and the rest of the team for completing this important white paper and for the work they do every day to spearhead 5G innovation.”