Huawei, China Mobile, and a number of key industry partners have released a 5G-Advanced technology evolution white paper – the first in the industry to expand on the architecture and technical direction for 5G-Advanced, aiming to provide guidelines that will promote 5G technologies and construct a sustainable 5G industry.

The white paper is entitled “5G-Advanced Technology Evolution from a Network Perspective — Towards a New Era of Intelligent Connect X”. 

Some of the representatives who attended the release ceremony, and delivered keynotes on August 5, include Duan Xiaodong (Vice President of China Mobile Research Institute), Liu Hong (Head of Technology at Greater China, GSMA), Richard Liu (President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line), and Harri Holma (Fellow and Chief Advisor of Radio Systems, Nokia). 

Though scaling up rapidly, 5G has yet to reach maturity. To extract greater social and economic value from 5G, 3GPP* officially announced 5.5G as the second phase of 5G, naming it 5G-Advanced. From here, industry partners reached consensus on 5G-Advanced development and composed this white paper to clarify the requirements and technologies for its evolution from 5G, thus expediting its development on networks.

5G is essential to upgrading service experience and fuelling digital and intelligent transformation of industries. To penetrate deeper into industries, 5G requires the convergence of DT, OT, IT, and CT (DOICT). And the core network, akin to the brain of the E2E network, plays a pivotal role in 5G-Advanced network evolution. 

To enhance network capabilities and meet ever-diversifying service requirements, 5G-Advanced will evolve both 5G architecture and technology.

Under the 5G-Advanced network architecture come cloud-network and computing-network synergies. Cloud Native can be utilised to strengthen the NFV-based telecom cloud and enable flexible deployment of 5G networks. Edge Network can combine distributed networks with edge services. Network-as-a-Service will enable various customised solutions for vertical industries. Moreover, 5G-Advanced technologies have three main highlights:

AI will take the capabilities and quality of services to new heights through network functions and network management. Convergence will combine different RATs and different types of networks for unified support. Network services can be tailored to different industries.

Enablement will customise networks with proactivity, flexibility, and resource isolation under 5G-Advanced capabilities.

With continuous enhancement, 5G-Advanced will allow for the rapid roll out of network functions to be iterated on-demand in order to fit into various service scenarios.

The new white paper serves as a valuable reference for 5G-Advanced development. 

Click here to download the 5G-Advanced Technology Evolution White Paper

*The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) unites Seven telecommunications standard development organisations (ARIB, ATIS, CCSA, ETSI, TSDSI, TTA, TTC), known as “Organisational Partners” and provides their members with a stable environment to produce the Reports and Specifications that define 3GPP technologies.