Standardisation in 5G

Given its global nature, and the connections it creates between ICT and non-ICT sectors, 5G critically depends on standards to ensure interoperability, security, privacy and data protection.

Standards allow the existence of open markets for both the final customers, who want to use different services from different providers, and providers wanting to use different products from different suppliers to reduce costs and accelerate time to market. From an economic perspective, standards and the way they are implemented will make one of the most meaningful contributions to the 5G PPP programme, helping pull different technologies under one umbrella as 5G becomes increasingly reliant on standards, with a focus on interconnection and interoperability.

Lack of timely technical solutions may endanger the growth of 5G-enabled products and services and put at risk the privacy and liberty of citizens. Yet progress on standardisation of 4G/LTE has been hindered because of the difficulty in creating consensus on fundamental architectural issues related to security, e.g. the placement of the user data encryption.

The 5G-ENSURE Standardisation Plan is aimed at ensuring contributions to 5G standardisation are both timely and targeted, with partners pursuing an industry-led approach and by downstreaming relevant research results into the standardisation process.

The 5G security standardisation plan focuses on:

• contributions to the most relevant standards bodies, particularly 3GPP and ETSI.

• monitoring of on-going studies on 5G standardisation.

The ultimate goal is help create some kind of harmonisation within the standardisation ecosystem.

5G-ENSURE has also undertaken actions with other standards bodies to share project results of interest. The on-going collaboration with NIST is one example of this.