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SA4’s 6G media study wants to measure AI traffic

The 6G media study (TR 26.870) is looking at a new kind of traffic: AI traffic from chat, agents and multimodal assistants. The industry groundwork is a measurement effort to find out what that traffic looks like on a network.

In 60 seconds

  • Study: FS_6G_MED / TR 26.870, SA4. Co-rapporteurs from Vodafone and Qualcomm. WID SP-251652, due March 2027.
  • Input: a 5G-MAG testbed built to feed SA4 6G media contributions. It covers 11+ AI scenarios and 60+ KPIs.
  • New metrics: time-to-first-token (TTFT), time-per-output-token (TPOT), uplink/downlink ratio and agent loop factor.
  • Not in scope here: IVAS and avatar calls. Those are separate 5G-Advanced items.
SASA4 · TR 26.870

The study and its owners

TR 26.870, “Study on Media Aspects for 6G System”, has two rapporteurs: Elmira Ramazanirend (Vodafone) and Thomas Stockhammer (Qualcomm). Stockhammer also leads the work item, FS_6G_MED (WID SP-251652), which runs from December 2025 to March 2027. That end date lines up with Release 21 package approval in March 2027.

SA5G-MAG · 6G Testbed

Characterising AI traffic

In February 2026, 5G-MAG launched a 6G Testbed & AI Traffic Characterization project. Its stated aim is to help the industry understand and evaluate how different AI engines consume network resources and tolerate network issues. The open-source code says it is designed to support SA4 6G media study contributions.

DimensionWhat is measured
Scenarios (11+)Agentic AI with MCP tools; multimodal (audio, video and images together); real-time variants over WebRTC and WebSockets
KPIs (60+)TTFT, TPOT, latency percentiles, uplink/downlink ratio, agent loop factor
Network profilesIdeal 6G, 5G urban, cell edge, satellite (NTN), congested
EnginesOpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, vLLM

The point for 3GPP: 5G QoS was designed around video and voice. The KPIs the testbed chose, such as uplink/downlink ratio and agent loop factor, show where it expects AI traffic to differ. To define 6G QoS and media handling for it, SA4 first needs measurements.

SASA4 · Release 20, 5G-Advanced

What 6G media is not

Two SA4 items are easy to confuse with the 6G study:

  • IVAS (immersive voice and audio): Release 19 moved it from standardisation to implementation, with algorithmic delay of 38 ms or less and 5.1/7.1 support.
  • Avatar calls over IMS (FS_Avatar_Ph2, Rel-20): ISO/IEC 23090-39 is adopted as the baseline avatar format.

Both are 5G-Advanced work. The 6G study may build on them, but they are not its subject.

Still open

Whether SA4 proposes new QoS characteristics or traffic models for AI traffic, and how those reach SA2’s 6G QoS framework.

Watch next

  • SA4 contributions: the first AI-traffic measurement results submitted to the 6G media study.
  • SA2 QoS framework: whether AI-traffic characteristics are reflected in the 6G QoS key issue.

Sources

The testbed is an industry project feeding contributions, not a 3GPP agreement.