At Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023, radio intelligence continued to be a big theme for the second year in row. Leading infrastructure players and Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) supporters showcased significant advances in their approaches to better manage radio network resources in response to increasing requirements of various 5G services, including performance, traffic, latency, coverage, power consumption and overall user experience. These solutions promise to automate network operations, including spectrum and resource allocation, scheduling, real-time power configuration in response to traffic demand, and potential anomalies of the network, such as inter-cell interference.
With radio intelligence, mobile operators will be able to onboard new 5G services easily, either their own or third-party applications through ecosystem partners, enabling them to address new use cases and create new business models not possible with existing networks.
There were two prominent approaches to radio intelligence at the show. The first was based on the Radio Intelligence Controller (RIC), which is a component of the guideline framework developed by the O-RAN Alliance. The second approach is to enhance the intelligent capability based on a legacy network, with Huawei’s IntelligentRAN being a major solution showcased at Its Products & Solutions Launch event during MWC 2023.
Several vendors exhibited their RIC-based platforms at the show, showcasing different features. However, very few of these platforms have reached the General Availability (GA) stage yet and none claimed any deployments in existing brownfield networks. Although RIC interfaces, especially those associated with the near-real-time RIC (E1 interface), are fully specified in the O-RAN Alliance, the implementation of an RIC is already fragmented before the technology even reaches commercial deployment, with multiple vendors developing their own RIC platforms and offering their own Software Development Kits (SDKs) that will not necessarily interoperate with each other.
Indeed, incumbent infrastructure vendors, such as Ericsson and Nokia, have been developing their own optimization platforms exclusively for their own radio networks, many of which offer similar functionality to an RIC. Some Open RAN vendors claim that they can offer RIC platforms capable of operating across multi-vendor RAN environments. However, such implementations require significant customization efforts and may face interoperability challenges. Furthermore, the numerous RIC solutions offered by various Open RAN players could hinder the integration, portability and scalability of enabled applications (both real-time and non-real-time applications) across various RIC and radio network infrastructure environments. Furthermore, the current RIC implementations are generic and do not specify the exact use cases and applications they cater to, making them abstract, broad in their approach and less optimized to address the specific requirements of individual use cases (e.g., spectrum management, power management, interference management, etc.).
As an alternative to the RIC, Huawei has developed its IntelligentRAN, a unique implementation of radio intelligence. The solution was first introduced at MWC 2022, and further enhancements were unveiled at the Huawei Products & Solutions Launch event during MWC 2023. While the industry is still figuring out how to deploy RICs, Huawei claims that its IntelligentRAN has already been commercially deployed in several regions, including Spain, Germany, Italy, Thailand, China and other Asian regions. This has helped its partner operators optimize power consumption of their networks.
IntelligentRAN primarily focuses on using intelligent technologies with Huawei’s experience in network deployment and management to manage RAN functions in increasingly complex network architectures that support multiple frequency bands, sites and beams. Its main objective is to enable mobile operators to fully utilize and optimize their network resources on demand whenever and wherever these resources are needed. In other words, IntelligentRAN is designed to help mobile operators cope with diversified service offerings and changes without compromising the overall user experience through differentiated Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). It can assist mobile operators in handling the exponential traffic growth carried over their networks without compromising power consumption.
Unlike the RIC, with largely undefined use cases, Huawei’s IntelligentRAN approach to radio intelligence is more pragmatic. IntelligentRAN is based on three foundational functions that are use case-centric: iPowerStar, iHashBAND and iFaultCare.
iPowerStar, which was introduced in early 2022, is designed to manage end-to-end energy consumption across multiple network channels, including time, space, frequency and power domains, and to help mobile operators optimize the overall network power consumption without compromising performance. iPowerStar has already been commercially deployed across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. From early commercial deployments, Huawei claims iPowerStar could enable mobile operators to save up to 25% of the energy required to handle the same amount of traffic over conventional networks.
iHashBAND is designed to improve the overall user experience and network performance by enabling mobile operators to take full advantage of existing 5G multiband deployments. Using an intelligent algorithm, iHashBAND maps the channel and usage conditions across each frequency band to predict potential options for carrier selection and carrier aggregation. The goal is to optimize the uplink and downlink throughput in multi-service scenarios. Huawei claims that iHashBAND could improve the average throughput experience and network usability by up to 30%, compared to traditional solutions, without any changes to spectrum resources or hardware capabilities.
iFaultCare is for troubleshooting mobile networks with the objective of predicting potential network fault scenarios, notably those related to inter-cell interferences, signal strength conditions, latency, configuration, or any other problems that could affect the overall user experience or expose the network to service interruption. Huawei claims that it could help mobile operators improve the operation and maintenance of their networks, with up to a 40% increase in troubleshooting efficiency and up to a 20% decrease in cell service interruption time.
Looking forward, Huawei aims to help the industry make radio intelligence a native feature of the network, with full-fledged standard specifications. The introduction of IntelligentRAN is one step forward in this direction, as this framework is a case in point of how radio intelligence should be used to address real-life pain points that currently burden mobile operators and their partners. It may be a more efficient and economical solution to optimize existing networks, especially for 5G implementations with Huawei the dominant vendor.
