The Fifth Generation of Mobile Telephony, or 5G, or 5GS, is the system defined by 3GPP from Release 15, functionally frozen in June 2018 and fully specified by September 2019.

5G features fall into the Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Massive Machine-type Communications (mMTC) and Ultra-reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) categories. All three are needed to develop a full set of services for transport, broadcast, critical comms, healthcare, Industry 4.0, personal area networks...and all things IoT.

Release 18 specifies further improvements of the 5G-Avanced system. These improvements consist both in enhancements of concepts/Features introduced in the previous Releases and in the introduction of new topics.

“Becoming 5G-Advanced: the 3GPP 2025 Roadmap” explores the following key topics: 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

to deliver on the full promise of the Internet of Everything. Release 18 will deliver 5G-Advanced, as the mid-point of 5G standardization. SA1 -Services Network of Service Robots with Ambient Intelligence Energy Efficiency as service criteria Upper layer traffic steering, switching and split over dual 3GPP access Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (Phase 3)

The success of the 3GPP partnership model and the convergence of the world’s network operators on the 3GPP system is now encouraging new industries to join the work. The rocketing number of use cases for 5G is creating new requirements and is making a real impact on the 3GPP prioritization process for new studies and normative efforts in the ...

For Rel-20 5G-Advanced, 3GPP has set an 18-month roadmap focused on enhancing the current capabilities of 5G. The planned schedule ensures a steady progression toward critical upgrades, with progressive freezes as follows:

The past few days (June 28 – July 2, 2021) have seen the first internal 3GPP workshop on the radio specific content of Release 18, reviewing over 500 company and partner organization’s presentations, to identify topics for the immediate and longer-term commercial needs for *:

The 3GPP specifications have a specification number, used to describe the work. Find here links to listings of the specifications & reports in each series.

3GPP initiated discussions on 5G in Rel-15. Since then, while more and more network features have been introduced in to the specifications, more management features have also been specified. 3GPP officially published Release 18 (Rel-18) in March 2024. Rel-18 new management features can be classified according to the following four aspects: