Background and Scope
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) was formed in 1998 following the success of the original second generation European standardisation programme of mobile (GSM) under ETSI, and parallel 2G standards in other regions. At that time, ETSI partnered with other regional and national standards bodies (such as ATIS in the US, CCSA in China, ARIB in Japan and TTA in Korea) to start a joint project with the goal of setting a single global standard for the next generation of mobile, i.e. 3G mobile. Since then, 3GPP has specified the third, fourth and fifth generations of mobile technology, and has recently agreed a roadmap to 6G. As a partnership, 3GPP writes specifications rather than standards; under the terms of the partnership agreement, all the partners have agreed to adopt all these specifications as their standards. So, in Europe, 3GPP specifications are ETSI standards.
The scope of 3GPP covers all aspects of mobile networks from handsets to radio network base stations to the complex core network which are interconnected to allow both interconnection and roaming of mobile devices between networks.
Organisation and Working Methods
Membership of 3GPP is via its member standards bodies, so in Europe, to become a member of 3GPP and participate in its meetings, means being a member of ETSI.
3GPP is organised into working groups and these working groups are organised into three areas, namely core network and terminals (CT), radio access network (RAN), and service and system aspects (SA)
Working groups progress work items (which may be proposed by the working group but are approved by the 3GPP plenary) and work items (WI) will lead to either a specification (to be a standard) or a technical report (to provide information, or the basis for future specification work).
All work items should have a clear deliverable, the support of a minimum number of 3GPP members who are willing to contribute to the work item, and a realistic timetable for delivery.
The WI will normally have a rapporteur (editor) who is responsible for organising work on the deliverable and maintaining successive drafts of the document(s). The rapporteur is not responsible for writing the documents - this is the responsibility of all involved, including members that did not openly support the proposal.
Work items often span across multiple working groups, in which case there could be a lead working group, and a corresponding lead rapporteur – while each WG may have its own rapporteur(s) tracking the required work and the affected specifications.
All specification documents in 3GPP, both while in draft form and once published, can be subject to a ‘change request’ (CR) and documents are subject to version control.
Documentation
3GPP documents, both specification and reports, are organised into ‘releases’. Each release supports a set of features (which grows with later releases) and there is general consistency of specifications within a release.
Releases are roughly every 18 months and are broadly aligned with the generations, i.e. 3G, 4G (originally called long term evolution – LTE), 5G, and now 6G. For example, the first normative output for 4G was part of release 8, while the first normative output of 5G appeared in release 15. Generations do overlap – 3G and 4G developments continued to feature in the outputs of 3GPP during and beyond the two releases above.
The same specification spans more than one release with the later release likely to have an updated version of the specification. Within each release, each specification may also have different versions as features or corrections are added.
Accessing documentation
All approved documentation is publicly available and can be accessed from several perspectives, for example, by technical subject area (series), or by the current version at a particular plenary meeting.