Ericsson taps Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise to build virtual versions of real cities
With urban network densification for 5G buildouts a pressing issue for telcos worldwide, Nvidia this week offered more details about how it’s helping Ericsson figure out where to put 5G antennas. Nvidia said that Ericsson is building virtual versions of real cities using Nvidia’s Omniverse platform, to figure out optimal real-world antenna placement.
Called “the digital twin approach,” Ericsson uses Omniverse to model radio wave propagation data to precisely model signal strength and quality.
“The NVIDIA Omniverse platform provides key technologies that allow Ericsson to accurately model network performance across dynamic environmental elements. NVIDIA RTX-accelerated real-time ray tracing allows researchers to see precise representations of signal quality at every point in the city, in real time, which wasn’t possible before. This means Ericsson can experiment with its telecom products such as beam-forming and explore their impact interactively and instantaneously,” wrote Richard Kerris, Nvidia’s industry GM for media and entertainment.
Omniverse provides greater detail than was available before, according to Ericsson.
“Before Omniverse, coverage and capacity of networks was analyzed by simplifying many aspects of the complex interactions, such as the physical phenomena and mobility aspects. Now we’ll be able to simulate network deployments and features in a highly detailed scale using Omniverse,” said Germán Ceballos, a researcher at Ericsson.
“NVIDIA’s entire body of work”
Nvidia unveiled Omniverse in 2020. Omniverse is a collaborative 3D design and simulation platform, a way to build 3D virtual worlds. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described Omniverse as similar to the metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash (as opposed to Facebook/Meta’s idea).
Omniverse was first released in its Beta phase in December 2020 and is a virtual environment built on “NVIDIA’s entire body of work.” The platform lets engineers “create and simulate shared virtual 3D worlds” that are physically based, with the physics simulated with NVIDIA PhysX and the materials simulated with NVIDIA MDL.
Nvidia sees applications for businesses a wide variety of businesses needing advanced 3D modeling and physics engineering – including Ericsson. Ericsson noted in a blog post earlier this year that it is using Nvidia Omniverse’s ray tracer in conjunction with the interactive tools to “manipulate and explore complex scenes,” which allows the company to experiment with product placement and explore the impact on RF transmission of that placement in real time.
