Huawei Unveils RAN Intelligent Agents for 5.5G Era

During the 2024 Huawei Analyst Summit, Huawei launched its game-changing RAN Intelligent Agents. The RAN Intelligent Agents introduce a set of telecom foundation model, RAN digital twins system (RDTS), and intelligent computing power to empower 5.5G with intelligence, according to Eric Zhao, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Wireless Network, highlighting that the RAN Intelligent Agents will reshape the O&M process, network experience, and service model to help global operators achieve a leap in network productivity in the 5.5G era.

After three years of industry development, 5.5G has become reality and made debut worldwide. In the foreseeable future, standard enhancement will give 5.5G greater vitality and 5.5G will support more services to broaden its business space. In return, 5.5G networks will continue to improve in three aspects. That is, every hertz of the abundant 5.5G spectrum will be efficiently utilized, every watt will be efficiently leveraged to improve 5.5G network energy efficiency, and more importantly, every byte will be efficiently managed to upgrade wireless networks from automated to intelligent.

Empowering Wireless Networks

RAN Intelligent Agents enable wireless networks to maximize the potential of the rapidly developing prowess of artificial intelligence. A set of RAN Intelligent Agents consists of a telecom foundation model, RDTS, and intelligent computing power. The telecom foundation model is trained on massive wireless network product knowledge and O&M experience to support the policy analysis and decision making of wireless networks. The RDTS implements a multi-dimensional representation of physical networks in real time to provide accurate network prediction for the RAN Intelligent Agents. The intelligent computing power provides centralized or distributed computing support for the RAN Intelligent Agents.

5.5G has to deliver diverse services that require various coverage, capacity, and latency. The imminent 100-fold data traffic growth will place mobile networks under tremendous pressure of energy consumption. The RAN Intelligent Agents support intent-driven interaction, all-domain sensing and prediction, multi-objective analysis and decision-making, and scenario-based self-learning. These four revolutionary features will enable 5.5G networks to become more productive, reshaping network O&M, experience, and service models.

First, reshape O&M process. The RAN Intelligent Agents leverage the specialized knowledge and experience of the telecom foundation model to quickly provide engineers with problem-solving strategies. This allows O&M to move away from time-consuming, inefficient multi-department coordination to significantly improve efficiency. During troubleshooting, the RAN Intelligent Agents associate a large number of historical cases to help quickly locate the root cause and generate rectification measures. As such, the entire process can be shortened from over four hours to just one hour.

Second, reshape network experience. Traditional single-objective optimization encounters limitations in meeting the diverse requirements of user experience. The RAN Intelligent Agents conduct multi-objective optimization to effectively balance network indicators and deliver optimal user experience network-wide. To optimize network energy efficiency, for instance, the RAN Intelligent Agents harness high-dimensional modeling to create a digital twin environment. In this environment, thousands of rounds of virtual iterations are carried out in mere minutes. This rapid process assists customers in swiftly pinpointing solutions that excel in both energy saving and user experience.

Finally, reshape service models. The traditional service provisioning process includes reservation, evaluation, and verification, which is too slow to address the dynamic user requirements in the 5.5G era. The RAN Intelligent Agents incorporate online real-time service evaluation that assists operators in achieving immediate service provisioning, thereby significantly enhancing the user experience. For example, during fixed wireless access (FWA) service provisioning, the RAN Intelligent Agents facilitate the online evaluation of various experience metrics including coverage, latency, and capacity. This enables on-demand service provisioning, drastically shortening the service provisioning period from 2–3 weeks to a mere 1 day.

In his concluding remarks, Eric Zhao called on to illuminate 5.5G with intelligence and embrace a future of digital intelligence together. He emphasized that the RAN Intelligent Agents, bolstered by the telecom foundation model, RDTS, and intelligent computing power, will undergo relentless evolution to enhance their capabilities and functions. Through operators' continuous management and optimization, this remarkable innovation will deliver even greater benefits to operators. Huawei believes that the RAN Intelligent Agents are poised to spearhead the communications industry into an unprecedented era of intelligence.