Technical Committee (TC) Mobile Standards Group (MSG) Activity Report 2022

Chair: Dominique Everaere, Ericsson Limited

Responsible for identifying European regulatory requirements for cellular systems developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP™), and for developing Harmonised Standards and related ETSI standards for the IMT family of cellular systems and technologies evolving from them.

The primary responsibility of our Mobile Standards Technical Committee (TC MSG) TC MSG is to perform work regarding areas of activity as requested by mandates from the European Commission and all other tasks attributed to ETSI in support of European regulation of related systems.

As well as identifying European regulatory requirements on cellular systems to be developed by 3GPP, TC MSG develops Harmonised Standards covering essential requirements under article 3.2 of the Radio Equipment Directive 2014/53/EU and related ETSI deliverables for GSM as well as the IMT family of technologies and their evolution. The committee maintains close liaison with 3GPP, 3GPP2, IEEE and the WiMAX Forum as well as other ETSI bodies which might be affected by deliverables produced by MSG.

TC MSG works alongside ETSI’s Electromagnetic Compatibility and Radio Spectrum Matters Committee (TC ERM) in the joint Task Force for European Standards for IMT-2000 and IMT-2020 (TFES). TFES has primary responsibility to develop European Norms (ENs) intended to become Harmonised Standards under the Radio Equipment Directive (RED) for members of the IMT family of radio interfaces (GSM, UMTS, LTE, NB-IoT and 5G NR), as defined in ITU-R Recommendation M.1457.

In relation to the Radio Equipment Directive – and to align with different 3GPP releases including support for 5G –TC MSG has been revising the multi-part Harmonised European Standard on access to radio spectrum for IMT cellular networks, variously addressing user equipment, base stations and repeaters. In 2022 five parts of EN 301 908 – originally published in 2021 – achieved citation in the Official Journal of the EU (OJEU):

EN 301 908-1 – Part 1: Introduction and common requirements relevant for IMT equipment up to and including 3GPP Release 15;

EN 301 908-13 – Part 13: Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) User Equipment (UE);

EN 301 908-14 – Part 14: Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) base stations;

EN 301 908-15 – Part 15: Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA FDD) repeaters;

EN 301 908-18 – Part 18: E-UTRA, UTRA and GSM/EDGE Multi-Standard Radio (MSR) base stations.

Work meanwhile progressed on development and/or revision of further parts of the Harmonised Standard:

• EN 301 908-3 – Part 3: CDMA Direct Spread (UTRA FDD) base stations.
• EN 301 908-23 – Part 23: Active Antenna System (AAS) base stations; in September this part was sent for ENAP (EN Approval Procedure).
• EN 301 908-24 – Part 24: New Radio (NR) base stations; in September this part was sent for ENAP (EN Approval Procedure).
• EN 301 908-25 – Part 25: New Radio (NR) user equipment.

Recently revised to align with changes in regulation, our Harmonised European Standard EN 302 480 (originally published in 2021) regarding access to radio spectrum for Mobile Communication On Board Aircraft (MCOBA) systems achieved citation in the OJEU.

2022 was also marked by publication of two further deliverables:

TS 103 859 V7.0.2 – Technical Specification on Publicly Available Specification (PAS) process for O-RAN (Open Radio Access Network) fronthaul control, user and synchronization plane specification; This publication marks the first O-RAN specification adopted by ETSI using the PAS (Publicly Available Specification) process.

TR 103 877 – Technical Report detailing technical parameter selection in EN 301 908 on Base Station (BS) Harmonised Standards.

A significant part of the committee’s work is in support of the European Commission’s next generation eCall initiative, where we interact with CEPT/ECC and CEN/TC 278 groups with a focus on testing. Accordingly work neared completion on revision of TS 103 683, a Technical Specification on eCall HLAP (High Level Application Protocol) interoperability testing, covering updated and new test descriptions produced from latest ETSI/3GPP base specifications.

See the full list of TC MSG Work Items currently in development here.