A domestic research team proposed the core 6G technology that has recently been in the spotlight to an international standardization organization, and the research items were adopted, securing a chairmanship, and laying the foundation for leading international standards in related fields.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced late last year that ETRI researchers would be leading the international standardization of non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) based on OpenRAN in a working group under the OpenRAN (Open RAN) Alliance, an international standards organization.

During the conference last year, the research team proposed a new research item (RI) related to non-terrestrial networks based on OpenLAN together with a total of 10 organizations including the three domestic mobile carriers, Samsung Electronics, and six overseas academia-industry research institutes, led by ETRI.

Thanks to the research team's standardization efforts, the research item has been finally approved by the Open Wireless Access Network Alliance nGRG Technical Oversight Committee (nGRG TOC).

In addition, Jaeseung Lee, a specialist from ETRI's Space Wireless Transmission Lab, has been appointed as Rapporteur, the chair of the research project, and will lead the research project.

Non-terrestrial network technology (NTN), which the research team is leading in establishing international standards, is a technology that combines mobile communications and satellite communications to provide communication services to areas where terrestrial networks cannot reach.

One of the key technologies of future 6GIt is attracting a lot of attention.

The research topic is about open-LAN-based satellite clustering for NTN, and related requirements analysis and use case definition will be conducted over the next year or so.

This has enabled us to play a leading role in discovering various user scenarios and securing standard technologies in related fields by applying open network technology even in non-terrestrial communication environments.

The research team explained that they achieved this result by proactively conducting standardization discussions related to 6G terrestrial (TN)/non-terrestrial (NTN) communications at the OpenRAN Alliance's Next Generation Research Group (nGRG) standardization meeting held in Montreal, Canada for five days from the end of October last year.

ETRI Satellite Communication Research Center Director Lee Moon-sik said, “Having our technology adopted as a research topic and securing a chairperson position in a standardization meeting with great influence in the communications field, such as the OpenRAN Alliance, is expected to have a significant impact on the future 6G market. “It is very significant in that it allows us to lead core technologies,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Alliance is a globally influential standards body that develops international standards for open, intelligent, virtualized, and interoperable radio access networks (RAN) across multiple vendors.

Based on these results, ETRI aims to complete a feasibility study and research report on related technologies through full-scale documentation work this year.

With this, the plan is to not only secure technological leadership in core 6G technologies, but also enhance technological leadership.

From 2019 to 2023, ETRI researchers successfully developed open 5G base station radio unit (O-RU) technology based on the O-RAN standard.

Currently, we are conducting a number of government R&D projects related to NTN and are also participating in related standardization in the O-RAN Alliance and 3GPP.