New 3GPP RAN Chair in conversation

In March, the TSG RAN leadership elections concluded with the appointment of Wanshi Chen as Chair for the next two years. In this first interview with him, Wanshi will outline some of his priorities for the new term and update you on the latest status of Release 17 radio specifications and on TSG RAN’s latest thinking on the process that will lead to the agreement of the content of the Release 18 package of features, that will become the priority once Release 17 is completed by mid-2022.

Adrian Scrase, ETSI CTO and the Head of 3GPP Mobile Competence Centre, will introduce our speaker and will spend time in conversation with Wanshi Chen, about his highly successful period as the RAN Working Group 1 Chair, about his new appointment to the TSG RAN Chair and about the prospects for a return to physical meetings later in 2021.

The European Commission demanded standardization regarding receiver characteristics and receiver performance parameters for Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio technology. ETSI TC ERM/TG UWB responded by developing innovative solutions for specification of receiver characteristics and receiver performance parameters for UWB and SRD.

Topics to be covered:
• Requirements of M/536
• Shift from Generic standards to product specific standards
• Development of relevant for UWB Receiver parameters
• New measurements standards for SRD and UWB equipment
• Worldwide UWB regulations between 3,1 and 10,6 GHz

ETSI ZSM ISG PoC#2 aims to demonstrate the capability to automatically scale out a network slice instance deployed across multiple administrative domains. This is achieved using the 5G assets of 5G-VINNI. 5G-VINNI is a large-scale, end-to-end 5G facility composed of several interworking sites, each corresponding to a different EU node and defining a single administrative domain. The management and orchestration capabilities of individual 5G-VINNI facility sites, and the enablers allowing for the interworking across them, are aligned with ZSM architectural design principles.
This webinar showcases the ZSM PoC#2, with a demo applied over a network slice deployed across two 5G-VINNI facility sites: Madrid (Spain) and Patras (Greece). This PoC demo will show how OSM and Openslice stacks collaboratively work to provide automation means for a zero-touch scaling operation over this network slice.

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This webinar offers an overview of the recently announced Open Source MANO Release NINE, and some of its latest features:

OSM Release NINE completes the native adoption of ETSI NFV standardized YANG Data Models (ETSI NFV-SOL006), ensuring a consistent standardized and interoperable way to describe network functions and services, allowing them to be deployed in any Telco Cloud and orchestrated by any SOL006 compliant orchestrator.

This release also improves the use of VNF Operations, providing a more efficient and scalable way to manage network functions in Kubernetes, and allowing to distribute the agents managing VNF/CNF operations (Juju Proxy Charms) across different types of clouds; bringing higher resiliency to highly distributed edge deployments..

Finally, from the management perspective, Release NINE offers a seamless integration with Grafana (the world’s most popular technology used to compose observability dashboards), that now supports Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), in order to provide granular access to dashboards for different users, based on their security profiles.

This webinar will provide an introduction into ETSI MEC and specifically the MEC Deployment and ECOsystem DEvelopment Working Group (DECODE). Before getting into the details of the MEC Sandbox, we will highlight MEC resources available to developers, including the MEC OpenAPI specifications on ETSI Forge, the MEC Developer Wiki, and information on MEC Hackathons. We will introduce the MEC Sandbox and do a live demonstration on how to get started. This will include showing developers where to find the MEC Sandbox, how to sign-in, configuring the Sandbox and selecting a scenario. Finally, we demonstrate how to interact with the MEC Service APIs (Location, Radio Network Info, and WLAN Access Info) via a few hands-on examples.

This is in alignment to our White Paper #38, available at https://www.etsi.org/images/files/ETSIWhitePapers/etsi_WP38_RRS.pdf)

Speakers will be Dr. Markus Mueck, Intel Germany; Prof. Seungwon Choi, Hanyang University, Korea; Prof. Vladimir Ivanov, State University of Aerospace Instrumentation, Russia

ETSI has recently generalized its Mobile Device Reconfiguration Architecture and related Interfaces European Norms such that Radio Equipment in general is covered. This Webinar provides an overview of i) the target Use Cases and related system requirements, ii) the architectural approach and iii) interfaces including the generalized Multi-User Interface (gMURI), the generalized Reconfigurable Radio Frequency Interface (gRRFI), the generalized Unified Radio Application Interface (gURAI) and the generalized Radio Programming Interface (gRPI). Finally, this webinar will illustrate how the technology can possibly support Article 3(3)(i) and Article 4 of the Radio Equipment Directive (RED) related to the Combination of Software & Hardware.

This webinar will introduce the newly released ETSI standard: DECT-2020 NR. It fills a gap currently in the IoT connectivity environment; it addresses industrial applications requiring either or both massive scale (mMTC) and/or ultra-reliable low latency (URLLC), complementing today’s 5G technology. The technology enables simple deployment and very cost-efficient operation, demanded by various industries such as logistics and asset tracking, industry 4.0 and building automation as well as condition monitoring. Thanks to its ultra-reliable autonomous and automatic operation, there is no need for network infrastructure nor for a network operator. It can be deployed anywhere by anyone in no time. The standard applies modern radio technologies such as OFDM modulation, efficient channel codings and HARQ. It also has a dedicated global spectrum at around 1900 MHz, ensuring low interference levels. Wirepas has been one of the key contributors to the new standard, which builds on current Wirepas technology.

SOFIE, an EU H2020 project, has developed solutions for decentralized operations across separate organizations leveraging blockchains. Ericsson, as a participant on the SOFIE project, has developed a demonstration platform integrating SOFIE solutions into a Secure Marketplace for Access to Ubiquituous Goods. The platform demonstrates a decentralized marketplace using interledger techniques spanning multiple ledgers as a neutral platform for consumer access to multiparty service providers.

The presentation demonstrates the use of marketplace and its interledger operations from the viewpoint of service provider on the marketplace, and how security of customer access is guaranteed while service providers can rely on the neutral marketplace to guarantee payment upon fully auditable service delivery chain. The presentation will also show how the complexity of the marketplace operations are successfully simplified from the customer's point of view into a simple, multiplatform and secure mobile application.

2020 has been far from business-as-usual for everybody, but the disruption to the 3GPP work has been minimised by a series of actions by the leadership. This webinar will look at ETSI’s central role in the project and at the achievements so far in getting 5G specifications ready on-time. We will look at the prospects for the next six months, as timelines for the 3GPP releases are aligned to the continuation of e-meetings, well into 2021.
Adrian Scrase is the CTO of ETSI and the head of the 3GPP Mobile Competence Centre (MCC) – permanently based in ETSI. Adrian also serves as the Secretary of the Project Coordination Group, which is the governing body of 3GPP.

Achieving security and compliance in cyber space through permissioned distributed ledgers

Presentation 1: Applicability and compliance to data processing requirements for a connected machinery

The presentation will describe the impact that the use of connected machinery has upon health and safety compliance. This will specify security requirements for electronic control units, telematics gateway, computational portion of smart sensors, computational portion of smart actuators, and computational portion of other devices. The PDL will not only specify security for on-machine communications between electronic control units and sensors but also to the cloud infrastructure.

Presentation 2: The exploitable properties of smart contracts to enable future generation applications

This presentation will discuss portability needs for future generation applications and their security requirements. The adoption of PDL and smart contracts can facilitate these challenges and implement secure and coherent data sharing.

The challenge of operating networks with encryption everywhere

The ever pervasive adoption of encryption poses challenges to many of the core stakeholders in society that rely on communications. From the perspective of the developers and operators of networks it makes many routing efficiencies difficult if not possible to achieve. The core phenomena that the ETSI ISG Encrypted Traffic Integration is trying to avoid is that of “going dark”, the phenomenon by which an authorised user lacks the technical or practical ability to access data, applies in particular to access to Encrypted Traffic where a normally authorised user, for example the CSP's management entity, cannot access data due the imposition of encryption by an end-user. The intersection of the two elements, A, representing network capabilities that, when content and headers are encrypted, pose extreme challenges to network operation, and B, representing Network capabilities that are core to development of cyber/digital business, has to be minimised, whilst always seeking to eliminate A. Thus getting to understand and mitigate issues that make A more likely and developing strategies that encourage all the good things that security and confidentiality of traffic using encryption can bring, i.e. maximising B, is at the root of the work of ETSI’s ISG ETI that this webinar will address.

ETSI ISG SAI is the first technology standardisation group focusing on securing AI. This webinar will provide an introduction to ISG SAI, the challenges of securing AI and current state of work within ISG SAI.

TC CYBER, the most security-focused Technical Committee in ETSI, is sharing its recent work, to celebrate Cyber Security Month in October 2020. Highlights for 2020 will include Consumer IoT Security, Middleboxes, Quantum Safe Cryptography, Cyber Security Act (CSA) and Radio Equipment Directive (RED).

The new TTCN-3 extension “Object-oriented features” introduces the concepts “classes”, “objects” and “exception handling” into the TTCN-3 language. Even though some of these concepts have been implemented implicitly in the TTCN-3, the concepts are now integrated explicitly into the language allowing a new style of test specification that provides new ways of designing abstract data types, in the form of user defined classes, and integrating external data by means of external classes. This presentation informs TTCN-3 users, test engineers and test managers about the newest developments of the language.

This Webinar will provide an update on the status of ETSI's Open Source MANO project and its latest achievements, including two live demos showcasing new features in OSM Release EIGHT and the end-to-end deployment of a mobile network service based on Magma EPC.

1)OSM Intro by Francisco-Javier Ramon, OSM Chair, Telefonica
2)OSM System Features in action demo by Guillermo Calvino, Canonical
Featuring: Next Generation User Interface, High Availability, System Quotas and Monitoring
3)Network Service Deployment with OSM demo by Gianpietro Lavado, Whitestack
Featuring: Magma EPC Deployment, High Performance Network Functions, VNF Catalog

The Testing and Test Control Notation TTCN-3 is the only standardized test specification and implementation language used in industry and research to define and execute different types of tests in multiple domains like e.g. telecommunication or automotive. The notation supports an abstract description of test scenarios. Due to multiple tool support, including powerful open source projects, it is successfully worldwide in use e.g. for testing and certification of mobile phones by 3GPP or the oneM2M products. The presentation introduces the goals, technical concepts and various applications of the TTCN-3 technology.

Mobile edge computing is a keystone of the Ultra-Reliable, Low Latency Connectivity (URLLC) and the digital transformation and mobilization of the enterprise industries. It also enables a new class of premium applications that require real-time delivery of live and on-demand content as well as a high degree of interactivity, for example: gaming, 360 video delivery, AR/VR, etc. ETSI ISG MEC and 3GPP have both worked on their own architectures for edge computing within the boundaries of their different scopes. Their common purpose, however, is to create an open and standardized IT service environment for hosting and supporting third-party applications in edge clouds while also leveraging the underlying network infrastructure. In order to accelerate time-to-market and promote industry adoption, it is essential to ensure alignment, leverage synergies and offer common practices and tools for the developers. This will foster innovation and enable the developers to write a single application software module that can run on every edge environment, and support the GSMA requirements for federation.
The speakers will review the emerging mobile edge computing use cases and the recently updated 5-year mobile edge computing market forecast from DellOro. They will also highlight the role of standards, the value proposition of the different standards streams and will show how those standards can complement each other when it comes to operational deployments. Some deployment scenarios will also be introduced.

Education is an important instrument in raising awareness and providing support for standardization. To promote the ICT standardization process, it is important to increase the understanding and attractiveness of standards with lecturers and students alike. Strong teaching materials provide a major tool that can be used to convey the value of standardization.
ETSI has published a detailed textbook and corresponding slide presentation in 2018. Entitled “Understanding ICT Standardization: Principles and Practice”, they have been produced in order to assist academia and students in understanding the value of well written technology standards. The textbook and slides can be downloaded from the ETSI website. The overall objective of this initiative is to get feedback for the material as we move into 2020-2021 as ICT is an ever-changing field.