ZTE and China Mobile report that standardization work for a multi company January 2018 contribution on Slicing Packet Network (SPN) technology was approved as a future ITU-T recommendation for “Metro Transport Networks” (G.mtn) at the October 8-19, 2018 ITU-T SG15 meeting in Geneva.

ITU-T SG15 Q11 focused much of the October meeting on topics related to IMT2020/5G transport networks, and approved three new work items including two related to that area.  The new IMT-2020/5G Transport-related work items are both targeted at metro networks, including transport of RAN traffic.  They are G.mtn “Interfaces for a metro transport network,” which is a new transport technology, and G.709.25-50 “25G and 50G OTN interfaces” that is an extension to the OTN.  The other new work item is G.Sup.sub1G “Sub 1 Gbit/s services transport over OTN” that describes existing and new mappings for sub-Gbit/s clients over OTN.

SPN is a multi-service network platform that can meet new requirements of the 5G transport, data center interconnection, enterprise customer services, residential access network services.  The SPN technology endeavors to provide: low latency, high bandwidth, ultra-high-precision synchronization, flexible management and control, and low cost.

At the October ITU-T SG15 plenary session in Geneva, Chinese network operators, equipment vendors, and research institutes submitted several proposals for 5G network transport technology solutions.  From Contribution 1034 by China Mobile and other China resident companies: A proposal to initiate a new work item on Management Aspects for SPN: 

Slicing Channel Layer (SCL) is defined as a path layer. Many SPN contributions have been presented in previous ITU-T SG15 meetings which clearly showed that SPN can be an appropriate candidate solution for 5G transport.,,

It is proposed that Q12, Q14 start a new work item on management aspects for 5G transport networks. It shall address management aspects of SPN network elements containing transport functions for the SCL and SPL layers. The same management architecture and tools for traditional transport networks such as MPLS-TP and OTN shall be reused as much as possible. The management functions for fault management, configuration management and performance monitoring shall be specified.

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Based on the above proposals (led by China Mobile),  ITU-T SG 15 approved G.mtn standard initialization of the SPN forwarding plane technology.   China Mobile persuaded industry experts attending the SG 15 meeting that SPN has advantages in terms of 5G transport capability, key technical feasibility and industrialization, ZTE and China Mobile said in a statement.

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Transport Network support of 5G:  An updated version of Technical Report GSTR-TN5G, Transport network support of IMT-2020/5G, was agreed. This report captures requirements for Transport Network support of 5G mobile fronthaul, middle-haul, and backhaul networks. A new Recommendation was completed on Radio over fiber systems, and a new Supplement on 5G Wireless Fronthaul Requirements in a PON Context.  New Recommendations G.8262.1 and Amendment 2 to G.8273.2 that specify new clocks to support synchronization for IMT-2020/5G were consented.

References:

https://www.zte.com.cn/global/about/press-center/news/201811/20181102

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/itu-t-created-new-work-item-gmtn-spn-weiqiang-cheng

https://www.telecomasia.net/content/itu-t-initializes-gmtn-standardization

https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/studygroups/2017-2020/15/Pages/exec-sum-201810.aspx