Strategic Focus Topics

NGMN’s Strategic Focus Topics reflect its objectives and working principles, focusing on the priorities set by the NGMN Alliance Board.

These topics are continuously adapted to align with NGMN’s evolving priorities, ensuring responsiveness to the mobile industry’s changing landscape.

For 2024 and beyond, NGMN’s priorities include driving 5G’s full implementation and advancing the three Strategic Focus Topics:

  • Mastering the Route to Disaggregation
  • Green Future Networks
  • 6G.

Mastering the route to disaggregation

DEVELOPMENT OF OPEN, DISAGGREGATED, VIRTUALISED AND CLOUD NATIVE SOLUTIONS WITH A FOCUS ON THE E2E OPERATING MODEL

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OPERATING DISAGGREGATED NETWORKS (ODiN)

NETWORK DISAGGREGATION E2E OPERATING MODEL

Project Lead:

  • Carlos Fernandes, Deutsche Telekom

Project Co-Lead:

  • Lennart Olaivar, Smart

Objective:

NGMN seeks to lead in mastering the route to open, disaggregated, virtualised and cloud native solutions. The project’s objective is to focus on the E2E Operating Model, considering key aspects such as processes, technology/tools, and skill requirements. It also aims to provide guidance to industry players on the roles and opportunities created by disaggregation.

Following deliverables were published:

Network Automation and Autonomy Based on AI

Project Lead:

Sebastian Thalanany, UScellular

Objective:

To achieve the transformation from network automation to autonomy through AI technology, NGMN will further conduct an analysis of technical requirements and implementation architecture research for network autonomy based on the network automation platform in this project.

From the perspective of technical and ecological requirements, in-depth discussions will focus on utilising open industrial cooperation models to consolidate industry consensus, unify technical approaches, provide R&D reference implementations, formulate industry standards, and promote the transition of the network from automation to autonomy.

Following deliverables were published:

Green Future Networks

DEVELOPING SUSTAINABLE AND ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS SOLUTIONS

Project Lead:

  • Saima Ansari (Deutsche Telekom)

Workstream leaders:

  • Energy Management: Antonio De Domenico (Huawei), Rishikesh Chakraborty (Vodafone)
  • Metering: Sabine Demel (Deutsche Telekom)
  • Environmental Reporting and Sustainability: Yuanyuan Huang (Orange) and Yildiray Ornekli (Turkcell)
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.

Following deliverables were published:

6G

ANTICIPATING THE EMERGENCE OF 6G BY HIGHLIGHTING KEY TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS AND SOCIETAL NEEDS, AS WELL AS USE CASES, REQUIREMENTS AND DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS TO ADRESS THEM

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Project co-Leads:

  • Quan Zhao, China Mobile
  • Narothum Saxena, UScellular
  • David Lister, Vodafone
  • 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:

Following deliverables were published:

Security Competence Team

Project Lead:

  • Xiaoting Huang, China Mobile

Objective:

SCT’s objective is to analyse security challenges and propose comprehensive security requirements and recommendations related to network architecture, deployment, and operational aspects for 5G and beyond. Additionally, the initiative aims to support security analyses and address related topics raised by other NGMN projects and teams, ensuring a robust and secure framework for future telecommunications.

Following deliverables were published:

Supporting 5G’s Full Potential

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.

Base Station Antenna Requirements (Active Antennas)

Project Lead:

  • Bruno Biscontini, Huawei

Objective:

The project team published Release 1 of their report in April 2020: Recommendation on Base Station Active Antenna System Standards V1.0.

The document includes:

  • Electrical and mechanical key performance parameters
  • Digital data exchange of specifications
  • EMF exposure mechanisms for monitoring and controlling RF power
  • Specification and testing of mixed passive-active systems using a mechanical integration kit.

The project team published Release 2 of their report in August 2021: Recommendation on Base Station Active Antenna System Standards V2.0.

The document includes:

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

Following deliverables were published:

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.

Following deliverables were published: