Rakuten Mobile teamed with Oki Electric and Nagoya University to develop autonomous mobile networks incorporating AI to manage operations independently, as part of Japan’s Beyond 5G R&D Promotion Project.

In a statement, the operator said the trio aims to work on technologies and applications to enable networks to autonomously respond to diverse service demands while operating stably. It added that to support projected traffic demands in future, networks need to be able to respond autonomously without human intervention.

The three also plan to create video streaming and IoT services for a robot connecting to an autonomous network.

Rakuten Mobile will work on a range of mobile network applications, while Oki will carry out R&D into two-way content delivery network control for sending and receiving high-quality video to and from robots and mobile devices.

Nagoya University will focus on building the required modules to allow robots to move autonomously as well as hardware such as cameras, mics, speakers and displays.

The R&D project will run to the end of March 2025. The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology at the end of October called for proposals for the Beyond 5G project.