ITU-​T has conducted studies on signalling requirements and protocols for future networks. Edge computing which is required for AI, big data, autonomous drive and robots are hot topics since IMT-2020 has been firstly commercialized in these days.

The future networks and the IMT-2020 will involve a wide range of services (e.g. multimedia, sensing, AI, big data, mobility, robots, etc.) including convergence aspects, based on its high computing power and capability in edge networks for heterogeneous networks (e.g. IMT-2020, LTE, 3G, WLAN, BLE, LPWA, etc.) and multiple devices (e.g. smart phone, tablet, laptop, sensors, CCTV etc.) and cloud computing environment (e.g. edge cloud, public cloud etc.) of different capabilities in dynamic combination for collaboration. This is the so called "Edge Computing", and signalling protocols are expected to bridge the source and the device to realize it. Those will involve federated authentication and configuration for dynamic media handover, per-session allocation of IP addresses and terminal configuration, network access authorization checking, in-session modification of service connectivity, attachment control, resource allocation for edge computing.

In addition, IMT-2020 increases the data packet traffic speed by up to ten times than 4G, whereas edge computing reduces transaction latency by locating computing capability in IMT-2020 network, closer to the end mobile users. In this perspective, cloud-based computing capability is also important to provide ultra-low latency-based data transaction for low latency and high throughput required services (e.g. VR/AR, Streaming Media, Industrial 4.0, Robots, IoT etc.). These procedures will have to be designed to take into account various emerging services such as AR/VR, Streaming Gaming, AI, Bigdata, Autonomous Driving, Robots, etc.

Maximizing service versatility and device capability also requires the maximization of resource utilization and awareness-based control. Accordingly, the core aspects of future networks, such as virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN), intelligent edge computing (IEC), multi-access edge computing (MEC), Cloud Services for access network must be considered.