The first phase of Huawei’s plan looks to cover 1,000 site engineers and 10,000 sites within six months
SHANGHAI—Chinese vendor Huawei unveiled a plan to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to networks with the aim of improving network productivity.
Speaking at a keynote of the MWC Shanghai 2024 for the 5G-A and AI roundtable, the VP and Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Wireless Solution, Eric Zhao, explained that the plan focuses on building an ecosystem of RAN Intelligent Agents in collaboration with telecom operators to increase network productivity. The first phase of the announced plan looks to cover 1,000 site engineers and 10,000 sites across the cities of Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Jinan and Shenzhen within the next six months.
“After three years of arduous efforts, the telecom sector has seen 5G-Advanced (5G-A) progress from vision to reality, and 2024 has been hailed as the first year of commercial 5G-A. To date, 5G-A has displayed quite impressive performance in terms of network, business, and device developments. Now, mobile networks face growing challenges related to complicated O&M, differentiated network characteristics, and diverse experience-driven operations. In line with this trend, Huawei has proposed bringing AI to networks, that is to build RAN Intelligent Agent that can reshape network O&M, experience, and services,” said Zhao.
According to the Chinese company, the method of bringing AI to 5G-A networks will prove effective in boosting network productivity. The RAN Intelligent Agent provides copilots that support role-based chatbots and agents that support scenario-based solution automation, it added.
The vendor explained that its RAN Intelligent Agent boosts efficiency by simplifying processes. Huawei said that a good example of this is the field maintenance engineer copilot that Huawei has launched. The copilot is an AI-based assistant that autonomously generates solution policies based on extensive expert knowledge to significantly increase efficiency. During a field case, it facilitated the handling of an optical path fault with tenfold efficiency, Huawei said.
RAN Intelligent Agent also enables networks to autonomously optimize experience and energy saving, according to the vendor. The optimization is automated based on multi- dimensional high-precision real-time sensing and the generation and delivery of optimal experience and energy-saving policies, it added. Huawei highlighted that in an area covered by 223 cells, RAN Intelligent Agent has been operating stably for thousands of hours, automatically maximizing performance while keeping energy consumption the lowest possible.
Huawei noted that this was the first time the company worked with operators to implement such automated network operations and maintenance.
The RAN Intelligent Agent also enables experience-driven service operations through the real-time evaluation of network resources. This allows operators to provision new services as soon as they are needed and ensure deterministic service experience, the vendor said.
“Our goal is to bring AI to networks. To achieve this, we will, for our part, shift from a solution provider to a co-builder of intelligent networks. We believe that the co-growth of RAN Intelligent Agent and networks will create more extensive business value, transform networks more rapidly, and lead our industry into a new era of intelligence,” Zhao added.
