The Emerging Shape of 6G Radio and 3GPP TR 38.914

In a previous post, I took a closer look at 3GPP TR 22.870 and questioned whether many of the proposed 6G use cases are truly new or largely an evolution of what already exists. That discussion focused on the service layer and the “why” behind 6G. The natural next step is to look at the radio side, where 3GPP TR 38.914 begins to outline the “how”.

TR 38.914, which covers 6G scenarios and requirements from a RAN perspective, is still a work in progress but already offers useful insight into how industry thinking is converging. Following the recent TSG meetings in Fukuoka, the document is reportedly around 90% complete, with many sections moving from open discussion to agreed text. That in itself is significant. It signals that the industry is starting to move beyond broad ideas and towards positions that will shape future specifications.

At a high level, the report brings together several key elements. It looks at technical principles, deployment scenarios and operational requirements such as RAN sharing, resilience, self-organisation and service awareness. It also begins to define the performance expectations that will ultimately feed into IMT-2030 discussions within ITU-R. In that sense, TR 38.914 is less about individual use cases and more about translating ambition into system-level direction.

What is interesting, especially when read alongside TR 22.870, is how consistent the overall narrative is. Many of the requirements being discussed do not represent a clean break from 5G. Instead, they reflect a continuation of existing trends. There is a strong emphasis on flexibility, automation, energy efficiency and the ability to support a wide range of services with very different requirements. These are all familiar themes.

The document also highlights deployment diversity as a central consideration. Terrestrial networks, non-terrestrial networks and combinations of the two are all part of the picture. This aligns with the broader industry push towards ubiquitous connectivity, but it also raises practical questions. Achieving consistent performance across such diverse environments is not trivial, and it is not clear how much of this requires fundamentally new radio capabilities as opposed to better integration and optimisation of what already exists.

Another area receiving attention is the evolution path from 5G to 6G. This is not just a technical question but also a strategic and, to some extent, political one. There is an ongoing debate around how tightly 6G should be coupled with 5G, and what role existing infrastructure will play. TR 38.914 does not resolve this, but it does show that the industry is trying to strike a balance between continuity and change.

The steady population of the document with agreed requirements across scenarios, architecture, spectrum and device types suggests that discussions are maturing. Topics that were previously open-ended are now being narrowed down, and there is a visible effort to close gaps rather than keep options open indefinitely. This is a natural progression, but it also means that certain assumptions may become embedded early on.

One example where the debate is still evolving is the use of non-terrestrial technologies within traditionally terrestrial spectrum bands. This has been a recurring topic and remains complex, both technically and from a regulatory perspective. The fact that it continues to be studied in depth indicates that it is seen as important, but also that there is no easy resolution.

From a critical perspective, the same question raised in the previous post still applies. How much of what is being defined here truly requires 6G? Many of the capabilities being discussed, such as improved resilience, better spectrum utilisation, enhanced mobility support and tighter integration with computing, are already part of the 5G Advanced. The difference is often in the scale, efficiency and level of integration rather than in completely new functionality.

That does not make the work any less important. On the contrary, defining clear requirements and aligning the industry early is essential for avoiding fragmentation later. TR 38.914 plays a key role in this by providing a structured way to translate high-level use cases into more concrete radio-level expectations.

At the same time, it is worth being cautious about how these requirements are interpreted. There is always a risk that broad and ambitious goals get translated into equally broad technical solutions, without a clear understanding of what is genuinely new versus what is an incremental improvement. This is where a more critical reading of the document can be useful.

Taken together, TR 22.870 and TR 38.914 provide a complementary view of early 6G thinking. One focuses on what the network should enable, while the other begins to outline how the radio access network (RAN) might support those ambitions. Both are still evolving, and both reflect an industry that is exploring a wide range of possibilities.

The real test will come as this work moves into more detailed specifications. That is where trade-offs become clearer, priorities are set and the distinction between evolution and genuine innovation becomes harder to ignore. For now, TR 38.914 offers a useful snapshot of where the thinking stands, even if many of the answers are still taking shape.

One aspect that deserves a closer look in TR 38.914 is the treatment of deployment scenarios. The document outlines a wide range of scenarios, from dense urban environments and indoor hotspots to rural coverage, industrial settings and wide-area connectivity. It also considers combinations of terrestrial and non-terrestrial deployments, reflecting the expectation that future networks will need to operate seamlessly across very different conditions.

At one level, this is not new. Similar scenario-based thinking has existed since early 5G studies, where enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency communications and massive machine-type communications were mapped to different environments. What appears to be changing is the expectation that a single system should be able to handle all of these scenarios more efficiently, rather than relying on distinct modes or optimisations.

There is also a stronger emphasis on extreme and edge scenarios. These include highly dynamic environments, such as high-speed mobility, as well as challenging coverage conditions where infrastructure is limited or intermittent. The inclusion of such scenarios highlights the ambition of 6G to extend connectivity beyond traditional network boundaries, but it also raises questions about feasibility and cost. Supporting these edge cases at scale may require trade-offs that are not yet fully understood.

The integration of non-terrestrial components into deployment scenarios is another area of growing importance. Satellites, high-altitude platforms and other aerial systems are increasingly being considered as part of a unified network architecture. While this aligns with the goal of ubiquitous connectivity, it introduces additional complexity in terms of spectrum usage, latency and coordination between different network layers.

From a more critical perspective, many of these deployment scenarios can already be supported, at least in principle, by existing technologies. The real challenge lies in delivering consistent performance and operational simplicity across all of them. This again points to a recurring theme. The move towards 6G may be less about enabling entirely new scenarios and more about making a wide range of existing scenarios work together more effectively within a single, coherent system.

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