The Road to Release 21: Key 6G Takeaways from 3GPP TSG #112


The future of wireless will not be defined by one company or one technological breakthrough. It will take shape through thousands of technical decisions made collaboratively across a global ecosystem.

That collaboration was on full display in Singapore from June 8–12, when Keysight hosted the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Technical Specification Group (TSG) #112 plenary meeting at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre.

The meeting brought together more than 590 delegates from 205 organizations across the wireless value chain—from mobile network operators and infrastructure providers to chipset manufacturers, device makers, technology companies, and research organizations. The breadth of participation reflects the global ecosystem working toward a shared roadmap for 5G-Advanced and emerging 6G technologies.

Why this matters

For Keysight, hosting the plenary was an opportunity to support the collaboration behind the next wireless generation while contributing technical and validation perspectives to the discussions shaping the industry’s path toward 6G.

Supporting the Collaboration Behind 6G

3GPP develops the technical specifications that allow mobile networks, devices, and services from different companies to work together. Its plenary meetings bring together the groups responsible for radio access technologies, network architecture and services, and core network and terminal capabilities.

These meetings are where competing proposals are evaluated, technical differences are resolved, and the industry develops a common direction.

Keysight framed its involvement in Singapore around the theme “Define What’s Next,” supported by three ideas: standards leadership, collaboration across the ecosystem, and helping move emerging technologies from concept to confidence.

No single organization defines wireless standards. Through its participation in 3GPP and other global standards organizations and industry forums, Keysight contributes technical knowledge, measurement expertise, and validation insight that help the ecosystem evaluate emerging concepts under realistic operating conditions.

That role becomes increasingly important as 6G moves from broad vision toward detailed engineering choices.

The First Normative 6G Specifications Move Into View

One of the most important outcomes from the Singapore plenary was greater clarity around 3GPP Release 21, which is expected to introduce the first normative 6G specifications.

Normative work translates the findings of technical studies into requirements and specifications that companies can implement. The Release 21 timeline reinforces the industry’s broader objective of enabling commercial 6G deployments around 2030. It also provides a more concrete planning horizon for operators, equipment manufacturers, chipset developers, device companies, and other organizations investing in next-generation wireless research.

3GPP organizes its standards work into releases. Release 20 includes continued development of 5G-Advanced alongside studies exploring possible 6G technologies and system capabilities. These studies allow participants to compare different approaches before committing to detailed specifications.

Under the current 3GPP roadmap, the Release 20 6G study phase is expected to continue through June 2027, with Release 21 introducing the first 6G specifications.

An agreed roadmap does not eliminate technical uncertainty. It does, however, give the industry a shared sequence for research, standards contributions, prototyping, product planning, and validation. That alignment can help organizations make better-informed investments and reduce the risk of pursuing architectures that later require significant redesign.

6G Builds on 5G—and Expands the Validation Challenge

6G is expected to build on the 5G-Advanced foundation rather than replace it with a clean-sheet architecture. Successful 5G capabilities can be reused and consolidated, while areas that became overly complex can be simplified.

Watch this overview of what 6G is—and what it is not—as the industry moves from early research toward standardization and implementation.

At the same time, AI-native functions, sensing, new spectrum, evolving network topologies, digital twins, and stronger security requirements will introduce new system behaviors, performance indicators, and validation requirements.

The discussions in Singapore extended across this broader range of issues, including new spectrum, network architecture, security, and migration from 5G. Three areas illustrate how the engineering challenge is changing.

For a deeper examination of the physical-layer technologies, spectrum considerations, AI and machine learning applications, sensing, non-terrestrial networks (NTN), and digital-twin approaches under evaluation, explore the eBook 6G Research and Innovation: From 0 to PHY and Beyond.

AI-Native Networking

In an AI-native network, artificial intelligence is considered as part of network design and operation from the beginning rather than added later as a separate management capability.

This includes AI-assisted radio access network functions, air-interface optimization, resource allocation, and support for growing volumes of AI-generated and AI-consumed traffic. AI could help networks adapt radio performance, predict changing conditions, and automate operational decisions.

These capabilities introduce important engineering questions. AI-driven network behavior must remain measurable, repeatable, secure, and trustworthy.

Engineers will need to evaluate not only whether an AI model produces the desired outcome, but also how it behaves as network traffic, radio conditions, training data, and computing resources change. New measurements may be needed for model accuracy, inference latency, adaptation time, and the stability of AI-assisted decisions.

Business impact: If these capabilities prove reliable at scale, AI-native networking could lower operating expenses by automating optimization, improving resource efficiency, and reducing manual intervention.

Explore the application note The Integration of AI and 6G focusing on creating AI-native air interfaces, optimizing physical layer (PHY) designs, and utilizing digital twins to simulate complex real-world radio frequency environments before physical hardware is built.

Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated sensing and communication, or ISAC, would allow wireless infrastructure to transmit information while also sensing objects, movement, or environmental conditions.

Potential applications include transportation systems, industrial automation, security, robotics, and real-time digital twins. In these systems, the network may need to provide connectivity and environmental awareness simultaneously.

This creates new validation challenges. Engineers may need to measure communications performance and sensing accuracy together, including how one function affects the other. Repeatable laboratory environments will also be important for comparing algorithms and evaluating performance under changing channels and sensing scenarios.

Business impact: In transportation and industrial markets, ISAC could open new sensing-as-a-service opportunities by using communications infrastructure to monitor movement, assets, and environmental conditions.

Non-Terrestrial Networks

Building on NTN capabilities introduced and expanded through 5G releases, deeper integration among satellite, airborne, and terrestrial networks could extend coverage, improve service continuity, and support more capable direct-to-device services.

At the same time, satellite movement, longer propagation delays, rapidly changing radio channels, positioning dependencies, and interoperability across terrestrial and non-terrestrial systems create highly dynamic operating conditions.

Accurately evaluating these systems may require synchronized network, orbit, channel, and global navigation satellite system emulation. This allows engineers to reproduce mobility, Doppler shifts, handovers, timing behavior, and changing satellite geometry before conducting costly field trials.

Business impact: Direct-to-device satellite connectivity could expand the addressable market by extending services to people, assets, and locations beyond the reach of terrestrial cell towers.

Explore the eBook Unlocking the Potential of Non-Terrestrial Networks with 6G Technologies for a closer look at terrestrial and non-terrestrial network convergence, market drivers, enabling technologies, and approaches for validating complex NTN scenarios in the lab.

The Singapore plenary continued technical studies in these and other foundational areas. It did not finalize their complete implementation within 6G, but it helped advance the common framework through which the industry will evaluate them.

Connecting Standards Discussions with Real-World Validation

Beyond hosting the plenary itself, Keysight supported opportunities for technical exchange among standards leaders, customers, researchers, operators, and technology providers.

The Keysight 6G Industry Day brought together 3GPP leaders and members of the broader wireless ecosystem to discuss the direction of 6G standardization. Joint customer and partner demonstrations connected emerging technical concepts with practical engineering challenges.

These activities matter because a written specification cannot reveal every implementation issue.

New technologies must ultimately perform across components, devices, base stations, networks, satellite links, and applications. They must operate under interference, mobility, changing channels, processing constraints, and other conditions that are difficult to reproduce using physical field testing alone.

Simulation, emulation, measurement, and end-to-end validation allow engineers to investigate these conditions earlier. They can help the industry understand tradeoffs involving performance, complexity, energy consumption, interoperability, and deployment readiness before designs become fixed.

The collaboration in Singapore also reinforced a broader point: standards development and technical validation cannot happen in isolation. Progress depends on sustained exchange among the organizations defining requirements, developing technologies, building products, and deploying networks.

Greater Clarity and a More Complex Validation Challenge

The decisions made in Singapore provide the wireless industry with greater roadmap clarity. They also illustrate how much more complex the next generation of wireless systems may become.

AI, sensing, satellite integration, computing, new spectrum, security, and advanced radio technologies will need to operate as parts of a coordinated system. Evaluating each technology independently will not be enough.

Companies also cannot wait until every specification is complete before beginning validation. Architecture choices, waveforms, channels, algorithms, interfaces, and end-to-end performance must be explored while standards work is still progressing.

Keysight’s role is to connect standards insight with design, emulation, measurement, and validation, helping the ecosystem evaluate emerging technical choices objectively and with greater confidence.

The 3GPP TSG #112 plenary represented an important step from broad 6G ambition toward a coordinated development roadmap. As work progresses toward Release 21, continued collaboration among standards organizations, operators, technology providers, researchers, and test experts will be essential to turn that roadmap into reliable and commercially viable systems.

Explore Keysight’s 6G design, emulation, and validation solutions.

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