Progress in meeting the directives of WTSA is documented in the WTSA-12 Action Plan. The fourth iteration of the Action Plan was submitted to the meeting of TSAG, 1-5 February 2016 as
.
For the first time, TSAG created a new study group in between WTSAs. At its June 2015 meeting, TSAG created the new Study Group 20 on “ITU-T Study Group 20: IoT and its applications, including smart cities and communities” (details next section).
Over 10,500 pages of ITU-T Recommendations and Supplements were published from 1 May to mid-December 2015, as well as Technical Papers, Technical Reports, Operational Bulletins and Focus Group deliverables. Figure 2 illustrates the number of texts produced since 2000 (as of 27 November 2015).
1. Explore demonstrations or prototyping with other groups, notably the open-source community
2. Enhance aspects of network softwarization and information-centric networking
3. Continue to refine and develop the IMT-2020 network architecture
4. Continue to study fixed-mobile convergence
5. Continue to study network slicing for the fronthaul/backhaul network
6. Continue to define new traffic models and associated aspects of QoS and operations, administration and management (OAM) applicable to IMT-2020 networks
At its June 2015 meeting, TSAG established a new ITU-T Study Group to address the standardization requirements of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, with an initial focus on IoT applications in smart cities. It is responsible for international standards to enable the coordinated development of IoT technologies, including machine-to-machine communications and ubiquitous sensor networks. At its first meeting, 19-23 October 2015, ITU-T Study Group 20 agreed on its structure composed by six Questions and two Working Parties. The second meeting held from 18-26 January 2016 in Singapore saw first stage approval of two standards, “Common requirements and capabilities of device management in IoT” and “Requirements of the smartphone as a sink node for IoT applications and services”.
ITU members approved a new standard to assess the environmental impacts of cities attributable to ICTs (ITU-T L.1440; October 2015). The internationally agreed methodology provides cities with a uniform means of quantifying ICTs’ energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The methodology will also assist cities in measuring their degree of success in promoting ICT-enabled energy and emissions savings.
The
ITU-T Focus Group on Digital Financial Services (DFS) reached its midterm in December 2015. The Focus Group, incorporating 60 organizations from some 30 countries, bridges the gap between telecommunications and financial services regulators, and the private and public sectors. Representatives from across the DFS ecosystem pragmatically address some of the major issues currently preventing DFS from serving the unbanked (
Full text of press release here).
Following a call to action from ITU-T’s CTO meeting at ITU Telecom in October 2015, ITU-T organized a Workshop on VoLTE/ViLTE (
web page), on 1 December 2015, devoted to the interoperability and interconnection issues which impede operators in setting up roaming for VoLTE/ViLTE services. The issue on VoLTE interconnection has implications for other important issues within ITU-T’s mandate, such as traffic management, billing, codec interoperability, QoS and numbering. The insights shared at this workshop will contribute to ongoing work in SG11 as well as SG3, SG16, SG12 and SG2.
The Focus Group on Aviation Applications of Cloud Computing for Flight Data Monitoring (FG AC) held its fifth and final meeting in Frankfurt, Germany, hosted by Deutsche Lufthansa, and submitted its findings to the February 2016 meeting of TSAG. The Focus Group finished four deliverables:
- Deliverable 1 - Existing and Emerging Technologies of Cloud Computing and Data Analytics
- Deliverable 2/3 - Use Cases and Requirements
- Deliverable 4 - Avionics and Aviation Communications Systems
- Deliverable 5 - Key findings, recommendations for next steps and future work
In July 2015, ITU members amended Recommendation ITU-T G.9701 (G.fast). G.fast is a new ITU broadband standard that will allow delivery of up to 1 Gbit/s broadband access over the traditional copper telephone lines that still make up a substantial proportion of so-called “last-mile” networks.
In November 2015, ITU members approved the first ITU-T standard on Big Data, Recommendation ITU-T Y.3600 “Big Data – cloud computing based requirements and capabilities”. The standard details the requirements, capabilities and use cases of cloud-based Big Data. It outlines how cloud computing systems can be leveraged to provide Big Data services, assisting industry in the management of large datasets incapable of being transferred and analysed using traditional data-management technologies.
Full text of press release.
ITU-T sees a large number of input documents being submitted on the exploration of future video coding technologies. In order to make this study more efficient, it was agreed to establish a Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) with MPEG. The informal joint activity will give room to a formal collaboration when enough evidence is gathered to propel the development of a significantly better video codec.
14 ICT leaders and ITU-T’s strategic management met for the seventh annual CTO meeting in Budapest, Hungary, 11 October 2015. 5G systems, service interoperability in fixed-mobile hybrid environments including IoT, trusted information infrastructure, and open-source solutions were key topics in the discussions and identified as areas of particular strategic importance to the participants.
The TSB Director presented a mapping of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to ITU-T to TSAG February 2016. While ICTs are not a stand-alone goal, ICTs are a key cross-cutting enabler for promoting and achieving each and every SDG.
T.1-5 ITU-T general assistance and cooperation
ITU key performance indicators for smart sustainable cities: Dubai and Singapore have joined a two-year pilot project to evaluate the feasibility of ITU’s key performance indicators for smart sustainable cities. The pilot project will contribute to ITU’s international standardization of the indicators and the subsequent development of a ‘Global Smart Sustainable Cities Index’ derived from this set of indicators. Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ vision aims to enrich citizens’ lives by capitalizing on the potential of ICT to improve environmental sustainability, resilience, and equitable social and economic growth.
Green cables for ocean and climate monitoring and tsunami warning: The ITU/WMO/UNESCO-IOC Joint Task Force on Green Cables Systems is tasked with developing a strategy and roadmap to add climate and hazard monitoring sensors to repeaters on submarine telecommunication cables to create a global real-time ocean observation network. The Joint Task Force is now advancing to a Wet Demonstrator Project in partnership with industry and a research cabled ocean observatory.
Collaboration with other standards organizations and forums/consortia:
ITU hosted Global Standards Collaboration (GSC-19): Critical communications, the Internet of Things (IoT) and IMT-2020/5G were in focus at the 19th meeting of the Global Standards Collaboration (GSC), a high-level gathering of ten of the world’s leading ICT standards bodies, hosted by ITU in Geneva, 15-16 July 2015.
ITU and MEF cooperate on standards that advance on-demand connectivity services: ITU and MEF concluded an agreement in October 2015 to advance the worldwide development and deployment of emerging connectivity services – designed to be agile, assured, and orchestrated – in addition to standardized CE 2.0 (Carrier Ethernet) services. The agreement focuses on opportunities for mutual standards referencing for CE 2.0 and LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration), standards compliance/certification and global education as well as alignment in emerging areas, such as trust in the information society, orchestration and virtualization, as well as 5G Cloud Access.
Full text of press release.
ITU and Georgia Tech Applied Research Corporation (GTARC) sign MoU: GTARC is a non-profit supporting organization of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (Georgia Institute of Technology is an ITU academia member). Both parties will raise awareness for IoT standardization.
Full text of press release.
ITU and Association for Information Systems (AIS): AIS is a non-profit professional association for individuals and organizations who lead the research, teaching, practice, and study of information systems worldwide. Both parties will cooperate on technical challenges of ICT ecosystems and infrastructures that would bring greater certainty, confidence and predictability to our interactions within the Information Society.
ITU-T SG11 collaboration with ETSI TC INT: ITU and ETSI agreed on a framework for collaboration between SG11 and ETSI TC INT. It details working methods to organize joint meetings and develop technically aligned standards. Topics of join interest include SIP-IMS conformity testing; Internet speed measurement; Framework of an interconnection among VoLTE/ViLTE-based networks; Requirements and test specifications for signalling protocol “DIAMETER” to be used in the IMS-based network for VoLTE/ViLTE interconnection.
T.1-6 Conformity database
The ITU “
ICT product conformity database” provides industry with a means to publicize the conformance of ICT products and services with ITU-T Recommendations. In Q4/2015, ITU called for test labs to bid for the opportunity to become ITU’s preferred facility for the testing of mobile phones’ compatibility with Bluetooth-enabled car hands-free telephone systems. The successful bidder will test the performance of mobile phones in the car hands-free environment on the request of any mobile phone manufacturer interested in publicizing their products’ conformance with ITU standards in the ICT product conformity database. Details relevant to the process can be found
here. The performance testing will apply the transmission-performance verification tests in Chapter 12 of Recommendations ITU-T P.1100 and P.1110, standards for narrowband and wideband communications in motor vehicles.
T.1-7 Interoperability test centres and events
7-8 September 2015, Bangkok, Thailand: 3rd Joint APT/ITU Conformance and Interoperability Event, conducting testing on NGN end-to-end service as well as IPTV (
webpage).
1-2 December 2015, Geneva: ITU, IEC, and ISO joint WSC Workshop on conformity assessment (
webpage).
A series of regular IPTV testing events is planned in conjunction with ITU-T IPTV-GSI in Geneva, to offer a continuous platform to test products based on both existing and developing ITU-T IPTV standards, to meet rapidly growing market needs. The latest one was held from 14-15 October 2015, with a new test item on IPTV-accessibility in accordance with ITU-T H.702.
T.1-8 Development of test suites
SIP-IMS: ITU-T Study Group 11 agreed on a conformance testing standardization work plan concerning SIP-IMS conformity assessment (
webpage) and benchmarking.
e-Health: Experts completed the work for the second edition of the Continua Design Guidelines in ITU-T H.810. The 13 Recommendations were approved in November 2015. A set of five new testing specifications is also added, to allow conformance testing of the new features in the second edition of ITU-T H.810.
ITU-T Conformity Assessment Steering Committee started developing guidelines for the recognition of test labs The first meeting of the Conformity Assessment Steering Committee (
CASC) was held on 3 December 2015. The CASC agreed to develop three Guidelines to implement the Test Labs Recognition procedure. The CASC was established by SG11 in April 2015 following the approval of a guideline “
Testing laboratories recognition procedure” for the identification of conformance test labs with competence in ITU-T Recommendations. The main objective of this group is to set up criteria, rules and procedures to recognize test laboratories (TL) with competence in ITU-T Recommendation(s) and to register these in the ITU recognized TL list. The three guidelines will also detail collaboration mechanisms with accreditation bodies such as IEC and ILAC. A roadmap was also agreed. More details are available on the ITU-T CASC
webpage.
Test labs to assess performance of mobile phones within car hands-free systems: See section
T.1-6.
