Company Announcement - ETSI has opened a new Industry Specification Group to commence work on Next Generation Protocols, looking at evolving communications and networking protocols to provide the scale, security, mobility and ease of deployment required for the connected society of the 21st century. The first meeting of this group took place on 21 January 2016, and was hosted by BSI, the UK National Standards Organization, at their offices in London.The telecommunications industry has reached a point where forward leaps in the technology of the local access networks will not deliver their full potential unless, in parallel, the underlying protocol stacks used in core and access networks evolve. The development of future 5G systems presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, as a sub-optimal protocol architecture can negate the huge performance and capacity improvements planned for the radio access network.

The ETSI Next Generation Protocols Industry Specification Group will identify the requirements for next generation protocols and network architectures, from all interested user and industry groups. Topics will include the following:

• Addressing
• Security, Identity, Location, Authorization, Accounting/Auditing and Authentication
• Mobility
• Requirements from Internet of Things
• Requirements from video and content distribution
• Requirements from ultra‐low latency use cases from different sectors (i.e. automotive)
• Requirements from network operators (e.g. challenges with E2E encrypted content)
• Requirements from eCommerce
• Requirements for increased energy efficiency within the global ICT sector.

The ISG will provide a forum for interested parties to contribute by sharing research and results from trials and developments in such a way that a wider audience can be informed. An action plan to engage other standards bodies will be developed so that parallel and concerted standardization action can take place as a further step in the most appropriate standards groups.

Andy Sutton, Chairman of NGP ISG said “The TCP/IP protocol suite has undoubtedly enabled the evolution of connected computing and many other developments since its invention during the 1970’s. NGP ISG aims to gather opinions on how we can build on this momentum by evolving communication systems architectures and networking protocols to provide the scale, security, mobility and ease of deployment required for the connected society of the 21st century.”

David Bell, Director of Standards Policy at BSI, said “Bringing together interested parties to solve current and future technical challenges such as this one, is why standards developing organizations exist. So BSI is pleased to work with ETSI and we were proud to host the kick-off meeting for a project which could have such a profound effect on the way networks run in the future.”

Participation in the Next Generation Protocols Industry Specification Group is open to all ETSI members as well as organizations who are not members, subject to signing ISG Agreements. For information on how to participate please contact isgsupport@etsi.org