5G Evolution for Multicast and Broadcast Services in 3GPP Release 17

5G communications systems are on the evolution path with present focus on enabling advanced features and new service capabilities. Multicast and Broadcast Services (MBS) are being considered as one of the most promising use cases of 5G. As introduced to Release 17 of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 5G standards, MBS work item has been developed over existing 5G framework. MBS standardization is targeted to enhance 5G New Radio and 5G Core Network capabilities for serving reliable, low latency, resource efficient, and massively deployable multicast and broadcast services from both architectural and transmission perspectives. In this article, we present an introduction to MBS standardization and outline newly introduced technical features, and their use cases. © 2017 IEEE.