A high-powered group of service providers, hyperscalers and telecommunication equipment vendors have formed a new initiative focused on driving the use of artificial intelligence (AI) into the radio access network (RAN) ecosystem.
The AI-RAN Alliance’s founding members include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Arm, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, SoftBank, Nvidia, DeepSig, T-Mobile US and Northeastern University. Their overriding goal is to steer the use of AI into RANs for better performance, lower operating costs, greater efficiencies and to support new business models.
This work will include using AI to improve RAN spectral efficiency, combine the two for more efficient network utilization and deploy AI at the network edge to support new services. The network operators participating in the group – SoftBank and T-Mobile US – will lead testing and implementation of technologies developed by the other members.
The group’s formation comes as operator interest in using AI to help power their network operations is increasing beyond simple customer care platforms.
Analysys Mason conducted a survey late last year that showed that two-third of communication service providers had automated less than 20% of their RAN tasks, but nearly that same amount wanted to automate more than 50% of their RAN functions and processes by 2027.
Bernard Bureau, VP for wireless strategy and 5G services at Telus, echoed that sentiment, noting the carrier expects AI and machine learning (ML) to be a large part of its network operations moving forward.
“The amount of analytics that are being generated by a network is gigantic,” Bureau told SDxCentral in a recent interview. “Having the ability to use AI and ML to improve the performance of the network is going to be very revolutionary in the coming years. It’s starting now, but this is going to be a game changer for how people operate networks.”
How AI can help the RAN
Analysts have pointed toward the use of AI to help close performance gaps for open RAN architectures compared with legacy RAN models.
“The integration of AI and ML techniques, along with other innovations in energy efficiency and GPU acceleration, will accelerate performance improvements closer to traditional RAN networks,” ABI Research open RAN research analyst Larbi Belkhit noted in a recent report. “This will remove critical barriers to open RAN adoption and pave the way for flexible, interoperable 5G deployments for network operators rather than reliance on radio network equipment from traditional vendors currently dominating the market, such as Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia.”
Subhankar Pal, senior director for innovation at Capgemini Engineering, in an interview with SDxCentral explained that one highly touted use case is the capability to use AI to better manage network resources. This involves being able to actively manage the use and power requirement of a cell site.
“Switching of a cell or switching off some of the antennas at night when they’re required, or even when we are speaking, maybe there are pauses, intermediate pauses, and can some of the time slots or the communication be shut off at the time,” Pal said.
This might not seem like a significant benefit, but operators typically have tens of thousands of large cell sites on their network, with ongoing deployment of smaller cell sites designed for more targeted and localized coverage needs. Having these all running when not needed is a huge drain on energy and financial resources.
As an example, Pal said larger carriers can spend up to $1.5 billion per year just on energy.
“If you can reduce 10% of this energy, that’s a huge cost saving and of course also helping your net-zero targets,” Pal said. “Energy saving is a big area for this.”
The increased use of AI in a telecom network could also help avert catastrophic outages like the one that recently impacted AT&T’s network.
“Automation and AI won’t eliminate every outage, but it can help uncover and avoid many outages and performance degradations while running simulations before changes or issues,” Forrester Research noted in a report on the AT&T outage.
https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/aws-microsoft-nvidia-lead-high-powered-ai-ran-initiative/2024/02/
