Artificial Intelligence in 3GPP 5G-Advanced: A Survey

Industries worldwide are being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI), and the telecom industry is no different. Standardization is critical for industry alignment to achieve widespread adoption of AI in telecom. The 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) Release 18 is the first release of 5G-Advanced, which includes a diverse set of study and work items dedicated to AI. This article provides a holistic overview of the state of the art in the 3GPP work on AI in 5G-Advanced, by presenting the various 3GPP Release-18 activities on AI as an organic whole, explaining in detail the design aspects, and sharing various design rationales influencing standardization.