Standards body ETSI has set up a new Industry Specification Group to explore the evolution of protocol stacks in core and access networks.
ETSI said the telecoms industry is at the point where advances in underlying protocols were not keeping up with the progress made within local access networks.
With the advent of 5G, ETSI said there was an opportunity to deal with this and develop a sub-optimal protocol architecture that can negate the performance and capacity improvements next generation networks will bring.
The ETSI Next Generation Protocols ISG will identify the requirements of future protocols and network architecture, looking at the likes of IoT networks, ultra-low latencies, increased energy efficiencies.
The group will share research and trial outcomes to ensure the correct standardisation of future technologies. Its first meeting took place last week in London.
Andy Sutton, Chairman of NGP SIG, said: “The TCP/IP protocol suite has undoubtedly enabled the evolution of connected computing and many other developments since its invention during the 1970s. 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 the British Standards Institute, added: “Bringing together interested parties to solve current and future technical challenges such as this one, is why standards developing organisations 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.”