Daily Dose of 6G

The stack that has to carry two radios

TR 38.760-2 is the RAN2 half of the 6G radio study — layer 2, layer 3, and the protocol architecture that has to coexist with 5G NR on the same carrier. Its draft sits at v0.1.1 while the RAN1 part is at v0.4.0. That gap is the story.

Transcribed from 3GPP’s published Release 21 timeline (© 3GPP 2026). The highlighted row is RAN2’s own normative deadline: the Rel-21 RAN2/3 functional freeze, Q4 2028.

The record

The portal entry is thin and worth reading exactly as written. TR 38.760-2, “Study on 6G Radio RAN2 aspects”, 38 series, responsible group RAN2, initially planned Release 20, rapporteur Li Chai, China Mobile Com. Corporation. Latest version 0.1.1; v0.1.0 was uploaded 14 August 2026. The linked work item is FS_6G_Radio (1080072) — the same parent as the other four parts, led by RAN1.

Set that beside its siblings and the shape of the study appears. The RAN1 part is at v0.4.0, uploaded the same day. The RAN3 part reached v0.6.0 back in June. RAN2’s report has barely left its skeleton fourteen months into a twenty-four-month study. That is not drift: RAN2 designs the protocol that carries whatever RAN1 decides, and RAN1 spent the last year deciding waveform, coding and frame structure. The stack cannot be written before the thing it wraps.

What RAN2 actually owns

3GPP’s own description of the group, verbatim: RAN WG2 “is in charge of the Radio Interface architecture and protocols (e.g. MAC, RLC, PDCP, SDAP), the specification of the Radio Resource Control protocol and the Radio Resource Management procedures.” Five named layers plus RRC and RRM. In 5G that is the difference between a link that works in a lab and a network that holds a call across a cell edge.

FS_6G_Radio closes 4 June 2027. RAN2#135 met in Maastricht the same week as RAN1#126, and with it gone five meetings remain. RAN2#138 ends 28 May 2027 — one week before the deadline. Five meetings to take a v0.1.1 skeleton to a concluded report on layer 2, layer 3 and RRC.

The design intent, as vendors describe it

No 3GPP source read for this edition states RAN2’s 6G conclusions, because there are none yet. What exists is engineering commentary. InterDigital’s Release 20 post — Ghyslain Pelletier, Diana Pani, Moon-Il Lee, Saad Ahmad and Atle Monrad, June 2025 — puts the two halves of RAN2’s brief plainly: “The L2 design will ensure that data transfer functions and procedures required to enable quality of experience (QoE)-aware scheduling can meet the stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements of new services,” and “The L3 protocol design will be revamped to improve energy consumption for terminals connected to the network as a function of their respective traffic activity levels.” Layer 2 for scheduling quality; layer 3 for battery. The same authors name “a single, scalable air interface” as the top 6GR priority.

Note the date: that post predates the work item’s own start on 6 June 2025. It is a statement of intent from one company, not a record of what RAN2 has since agreed.

Standalone first — and one decision parked at a plenary weeks away

The most specific public account of RAN2’s 6G posture found for this edition is Chathura Sarathchandra’s summary of RAN2#131-bis (Prague, October 2025), published 22 October 2025. It reports RAN2 concentrating on a baseline standalone 6G RAN and holding off on 6G dual-connectivity discussion until RAN and RAN1 give direction — deferred, it says, to TSG#113 in September 2026. It also reports a stated goal of a “unified measurement configuration”, to avoid 5G’s fragmentation across SSB and CSI-RS and across L1 and L3; and a “lean standardization” principle endorsed by the RAN plenary, under which RAN2 avoids specifying solutions for architectures not yet agreed.

The coexistence problem underneath all of it

6G will not get clean spectrum. Ericsson’s standardization blog says a carrier “can be dynamically shared between 5G and 6G”, with study aimed at “significantly reduce[d] overhead compared to spectrum sharing between 4G and 5G” — the multi-RAT spectrum sharing that Edition 09 found shaping the frame structure. InterDigital expects MRSS deployment in existing FR1 and FR2 bands. The alternative framing, set out by free6gtraining in June 2025, is dual stack: separate transceivers, two independent radio access networks, complexity moved into the device rather than the network.

Both are coexistence strategies, and both push work onto RAN2. Sharing a carrier means the protocol layers must interleave with NR’s. Separating the stacks means specifying how two of them behave in one terminal.