Project Portfolio

The project portfolio serves the NGMN Alliance’s objectives and working principles and supports the achievement of the main priorities as agreed by the NGMN Board.

For 2023 and beyond, the NGMN Alliance’s priorities are to evaluate and to drive technology evolution towards 5G’s full implementation and in addition three major focus areas:

  1. Route to Disaggregation with a Focus on the E2E Operating Model
  2. Sustainability/ Green Future Networks
  3. 6G

The NGMN Alliance e.V. project portfolio is continuously adapted to meet these priorities.

Mastering the Route to Disaggregation

Operating Disaggregated Networks (ODiN)
Network Disaggregation E2E Operating Model

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Project Lead:

  • Carlos Fernandes, Deutsche Telekom

Project co-Leads:

  • Javan Erfanian, Bell Canada
  • Lennart Olaivar, Smart

Objective:

The NGMN Alliance aims to lead in MASTERING THE ROUTE TO OPEN, DISAGGREGATED, VIRTUALISED and CLOUD NATIVE SOLUTIONS.
The objective of the project is to focus on the END-TO-END OPERATING MODEL. It will consider, amongst other, the following key aspects: processes, technology/tools and skill requirements. It also aims to providing guidance towards the industry players on the roles and opportunities provided by disaggregation.

The team has now published its first two deliverables:

Phase 3 of the project (2023) will translate the network and process impacts into end to end operating model options, their pros/cons, main decision criteria and blueprints.

Network Automation and Autonomy Based on AI

Project Lead:

  • Sebastian Zechlin, Deutsche Telekom
  • Lingli Deng, China Mobile

Project co-Leads:

Sebastian Thalanany, UScellular

Objective:

In order to realize the transformation from network automation to autonomy through AI technology, the NGMN Alliance will further conduct network autonomy technical requirement analysis and implementation architecture research on the basis of network automation platform in this project.

From the perspective of technical requirements and ecological requirements, in-depth discussion is performed on how to use open industrial cooperation models to consolidate industry consensus, unify technical routes, R&D reference implementation, formulate industry standards, and promote the network from automation to autonomy.

The first deliverable from this project was published on 14 November 2022.

Sustainability/Green Future Networks

Green Future Networks

Project Lead:

  • Saima Ansari, Deutsche Telekom

NGMN Office:

  • Chris Hogg
With Green Future Networks, NGMN is enabling the mobile industry to further transform and meet its environmental and sustainability goals. Since the project started in 2021, we’ve identified the key opportunities and challenges and made actionable recommendations on several key areas – most recently including how to manage sustainability in the Telco Supply Chain and introducing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Green Networks Assessment. Further publications are expected soon, looking at how to reduce environmental impact (water footprint, materials etc) and on network energy efficiency.
Our work in 2023 now moves rapidly into ‘phase 3’, which will focus on 3 topics:
  • Network Energy Efficiency
  • Circular Economy
  • Metering Standards
In Network Energy Efficiency, we plan to produce two outputs – an ‘Energy Savings Best Practices’ report that will highlight how operators can save energy through operational changes – and a more detailed ‘Energy Efficiency – industry roadmap’ which will provide decision makers with a checklist of key technologies, process changes, optimisations and the degree of energy savings / energy efficiency that can be achieved through each approach.

In Circular Economy, building on the phase 2 work on Reducing Environmental Impact and Telco Supply Chain Sustainability, we will further analyse how operators working with their value chain partners can enable circular economy in their products and services and produce actionable recommendations to decision makers to accelerate the adoption of circular economy.

Finally, in Metering Standards, we are building on the recommendation from phase 1 that there should be a generic unified metering architecture. The Metering Standards workstream will review the extent to which standards currently support this recommendation and then will take action (liaisons, NGMN member contributions to the standards) to ensure relevant metering standards can be developed.

6G

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Project co-Leads:

  • Quan Zhao, China Mobile
  • Narothum Saxena, UScellular
  • David Lister, Vodafon
  • Javan Erfanian, Bell Canada
  • Jean Schwoerer, Orange

Objective:

  • Deliver impactful 6G insights and guidance from an operator’s perspective in order to provide timely guidance to the industry
  • Play a key role in avoiding fragmentation of global 6G standards and ecosystem to achieve affordable deployments
  • Identify a set of high-level business drivers including social responsibility aspects and MNO operational aspects
  • Develop requirements by taking a customer centric view
  • Engage with different stakeholders, monitor external 6G activities and facilitate bilateral exchange with external organizations at the right time
  • Identify and analyse relevant SDO’s and industry organisations to maximize
    NGMNs impact

News:

The project has already published the following deliverables:

The project team is currently working on the next phase of 6G deliverables.

Supporting 5G’s Full Potential

5G Trial and Testing Initiative (Phase 2)

Project Lead:

  • Chen Liang, China Mobile

Objective:

  • Phase 2 of this project will build on the work of 5G TTI, extending the driving forces and test activities with an increased focus on 5G evolution
  • The NGMN Alliance will give guidance to the development of the 3GPP standards on Release 16/17/18
  • We will enable global collaboration of testing activities to ensure the development of globally aligned 5G evolution technology

5G Architecture Option 4 for 5G Standalone

Project Leads:

  • Raimund Walsdorf, Deutsche Telekom
  • Peter Stevens, Deutsche Telekom

Objective:

The commercial introduction of 5G started with deployments of New Radio (NR) technology based on the Non-Stand-Alone NW architecture (NSA), also known as “Option 3X” or EN-DC, which always requires an underlaying LTE carrier and connection to a 4G EPC. However, the full set of 5G benefits will only be realized once a new 5G Core NW (5GC) is introduced, enabling new 5GC-based services as well as providing 5G Stand-Alone (SA) operation, without dependency on LTE to act as an underlaid master technology.

This NGMN project intends to elaborate the advantages of Option 4 and to demonstrate the potential in an Option 4 field trial.

Security Competence Team

Project Lead:

  • Xiaoting Huang, China Mobile
  • Stan Wong, BT (Co-Lead)

Objective:

The team is currently working on 6G Trustworthiness Considerations.

The team has already published the following deliverables:

Base Station Antenna Requirements (Active Antennas)

Project Lead:

  • Bruno Biscontini, Huawei

Objective:

The project team published release 1 of their White Paper in April 2020. The document contains

  • Electrical & mechanical key performance parameters
  • Digital data exchange of specifications
  • EMF exposure mechanisms to monitor & control RF power
  • Specification & testing of mixed passive-active systems using mechanical integration kit

Work on release 2 of the White Paper was kicked off in May 2020. The team preliminary agreed to work on the following topics:

  • EMF field trials, field tests of counters
  • Test modes
  • FR2 AAS (mmWaves)
  • GPS sensors.

In September 2021 the project team publised their deliverable: Recommendation on Base Station Active Antenna System Standards.

Base Station Antenna Requirements (Passive Antennas)

Project Leads:

  • Hans Obermaier, Huawei
  • Jürgen Rumold, Ericsson
  • Roberto Vallauri, TIM

Objective:

The result of the project on Base Station Antenna Standards is an Implementation Recommendation which helps the telecommunication industry to establish industry-wide accepted antenna standards for the benefit of its customers.

The scope of the project is to:

  • Collect existing base station antenna standards
  • Develop specific recommendations on standards
  • Update the currently existing Whitepaper

A subgroup on wind load and related topics has been defined, which currently works on parameter and method definition.

5G IPR Forum

Project Lead:

  • Serge Raes, Orange

Project Co-Load:

  • Dao Tian, ZTE

Objective:

  • The NGMN Alliance IPR Forum is a unique platform to engage with relevant industry partners in order to discuss present-day licensing practices and related issues across different industry segments. The IPR Forum is focusing on the development of 5G and beyond
    • to promote a licensed 5G ecosystem,
    • to  improve the transparency of Standard Essential Patents (SEP) declarations to 5G SDOs,
    • to build trust on essentiality checks in Standard Essential Patents (SEP) declarations to 5G SDOs,
    • to adapt and expand the patent pooling, and
    • to address the emerging need for software licensing in the mobile industry and, in particular, as regards Open Source.
  • The work is done in consensus with operators, contributors and advisors.

In continuation of the past IPR activities and in line with the Business Objectives of the first NGMN Alliance White Paper in 2015, the IPR Plenary has focussed on formulating recommendations related to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in 5G.

The agreed 4 recommendations have been integrated into the chapter 7 of the second NGMN Alliance White Paper which was published recently. All four recommendations are intended to support the 5G ecosystem:

  1. 5G products and applications on the market should be adequately licensed and appropriate measures should be considered to enable the ecosystem to distinguish between licensed and unlicensed products;
  2. 5G SDO should consider requiring each patent holder member to declare timely to the SDO its potentially essential patents (SEP) and at least to declare the member’s licensing position for its SEP, and that the SDO makes these received declarations publicly available not later than upon publication of the adopted standard and anyway shortly after receiving them;
  3. a certain level of trust should be built among the industry players; this may be achieved if a SEP is subject to some kind of essentiality check(s) before being reported with its declaration, which may be updated afterwards; and
  4. patent pool administrators are encouraged to pursue a dialogue with the SEP holders, prospective licensees, representatives of the various regulators, and themselves in order to explore and build new ways of providing sustainable patent pooling services that seek to address and benefit the 5G ecosystem.

The NGMN Alliance will continue to provide with its IPR Forum a platform where the likely concerned parties – possibly including SDO and patent offices – may anticipate and address the potential issues in an open and inclusive manner.

The NGMN Alliance will engage into further activities related to essentiality checks of declared SEP, e.g. with the European Commission after publication of their report of their pilot project on essentiality checks.

This project is currently dormant.