The Role of DLT for Beyond 5G Systems and Services - A Vision

3GPP provided the specifications of 5G in Release 15. Releases 16 and 17 provided improvements to the system performance and supported the integration of new scenarios for verticals. The upcoming Release 18 will define “5G Advanced,” a milestone towards 6G. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will be new key components of 5G Advanced. They got already introduced in Release 17 for network automation, but are expected to play a more prominent role for network and service management as well as orchestration in real- and non-real-time. It is expected that AI/ML will boost the performance in all layers of the network, particularly in the orchestration of the emerging technologies of the mobile core and Radio Access Network (RAN). New services, such as Extended Reality (XR), will be considered together with the improvements of the 5G system. Efforts will be also spent on improving further other existing services and features, such as network slicing, Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), Non-Public Networks (NPN), Multicast and Broadcast Service (MBS), enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB); and Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) integration.