Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) and Huawei are pleased to join hands to co-host the international standard meeting of 3GPP RAN4 #79AH at Hong Kong Science Park from 28^th to 30^th June 2016. It is the first time for ASTRI to hold the 3GPP RAN4 meeting and it is the first time this meeting is held in Hong Kong in its history.

The 3^rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a global collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations. The scope of 3GPP includes the development and maintenance of standards of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced. The 3GPP specification work is done in Technical Specification Groups (TSGs) and Working Groups (WGs). Radio Access Network (RAN) Work Group (WG) 4 works on the radio frequency (RF) parameters and base station (BS) conformance, and derives the requirements for transmission and reception parameters, and for channel demodulation.

The meeting aims at finalising the progress of Narrow Band IOT (NB-IOT) and defining other Work Items in LTE-Advanced timely. The key topics of this 3-day meeting will cover BS RF conformance testing, radio resource management (RRM) and demodulation performance for NB-IOT; user equipment (UE) RRM demodulation and channel state information (CSI) reporting for licensed-assisted access to unlicensed spectrum (LAA); and elevation beamforming/full-dimension multi-input multi-output (MIMO) for LTE UE demodulation in LTE-Advanced.

Delegates from global telecommunications operators, equipment manufacturers, mobile terminals and chipset vendors including China Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, Vodafone, Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, Nokia, China Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT), Intel, Qualcomm, HiSilicon, Samsung, MediaTek, Spreadtrum, LG Electronics, Sony and NEC, to name but a few, this meeting is expected to achieve important progress and extensive consensus on NB-IOT and LTE-Advanced standardisation, thereby contributing to migration to 5G and development of NB-IOT as well as Smart City.