Domestic researchers are strengthening South Korea's leadership as a mobile communications powerhouse in the global market by developing 6G, the next-generation mobile communications technology.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced that it attracted the attention of attendees by revealing its latest research results at the '6G Symposium Spring 2024' exhibition held in Oulu, Finland for three days from the 9th.

At this exhibition, ETRI presented its ‘service mesh’ technology in particular.

This technology is a core 6G technology that solves complex communication problems that may arise between numerous virtualized mobile network functions that are dynamically created or destroyed in a cloud environment.

6G mobile networks are moving away from the dedicated hardware equipment structure of existing 4G/5G.

It is evolving into a cloud native architecture that virtualizes mobile network functions as software services and develops, deploys, executes, and manages them in a cloud environment.

Accordingly, network functions in the form of microservices developed in various languages and environments are deployed on the cloud.Oh, it's running.

To provide users with seamless mobile services, these microservices must exchange complex control signals at high speeds.

On the other hand, the existing structure had problems such as communication delays due to inefficient communication methods.

The new service mesh structure developed by ETRI has significantly improved communication delay issues by reducing existing networking procedures by more than 80%.

The number of networking stack traversals, which used to take 24 round trips, was reduced to just 4.

The mobile core network signal processing performance was improved through an agent structure that completely separates the business logic and communication logic that were mixed within the existing network functions and selectively uses high-speed communication methods such as the open source remote procedure call system (gRPC).

In addition, it provides a 6G development environment where network function developers can focus solely on developing core mobile service functions.

Developers no longer need to worry about redundant and additional communication logic such as network service registration, discovery, connection, and authentication.

“ETRI’s service mesh technology can be adopted as a core technology for cloud-native 6G mobile networks,” said Nam-Seok Koh, head of the Mobile Core Network Research Lab. “It is expected that this technological development will enable faster and more efficient 6G communication services and contribute to the advancement of global communication technology,” he said.

The research team said that this exhibition, which was held as part of the EU 6G Flagship project, provided an opportunity for Korea to further solidify its position as a global leader in communications technology.

ETRI announced that it plans to further expand and commercialize the technology through the next-generation communication industry technology development project promoted by the Ministry of Science and ICT.

This study was conducted as part of the Ministry of Science and ICT's 'International Cooperation Research on 6G Network Architecture and Key Element Technologies'.