PARTNER FEATURE: As 5G is applied to many more industries, the vision of a fully connected world powered by 5G comes along with new technical challenges and unprecedented opportunities. In the pursuit of an intelligent world with intelligent connection of everything, mobile networks face new diversified demands posed by numerous services and increasing network complexity. Therefore, global leading operators have proposed the strategic concept of autonomous networks, making digital and intelligent transformation of wireless networks an inevitable trend. How does the industry embrace both the challenges and opportunities and help operators implement autonomous networks through intelligent upgrade of networks? At the Pre-MWC Briefing and Product and Solution Launch event held on February 21, 2022, Huawei unveiled IntelligentRAN, a new wireless network architecture.

What is the need for Huawei to equip wireless networks with IntelligentRAN? What are the unique values brought by the industry’s evolution from O&M automation to network intelligence? Ma Hongbo, President of Huawei Wireless SingleOSS Product Line, shared his thoughts with us.

IntelligentRAN: from Internet of Everything to Intelligent Connection of Everything

As industry networks and service types keep growing in the 5G era, 5G networks, which are the ICT foundation of the digital world, promote digital transformation of a whole range of industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, and mining, and meet diversified service requirements. Ever-increasing scenarios and applications pose new challenges to KPIs of mobile networks, including KPIs for service rollout, experience assurance, energy saving, and intelligent O&M.

“Currently, global mainstream operators have adopted digital and intelligent transformation as their key strategy.” Ma Hongbo said that Huawei and operators will make joint efforts to cope with these new challenges and usher in autonomous networks by empowering wireless networks with intelligence and move forward towards Intelligence Strategy in 2030s. With this backdrop, Huawei has launched the innovative IntelligentRAN architecture at the right time.

IntelligentRAN is targeted at network demands of enriching services and resolving challenges faced by networks.

First, diversified service requirements: By 2030, 5G services will be hundredfold in scale, with industry applications increasing by 25+ times and personal applications skyrocketing by 50+ times. In the 5G era, single-mode communication between people will gradually evolve into full-scenario communication between people, between people and things, and between things. In other words, service scenarios will become more complex. All the services will be carried on a 5G network. For further service expansion, services require quick rollout, and a change in approach from experience-driven rollouts to real-time agile rollouts, to realize zero-wait, zero-touch service provisioning.

Second, consistent service experience: A wide variety of services have differentiated Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements on operators’ networks, which in turn have much different network capability demands. Against the backdrop of evolution to full-band 5G deployment, more frequency bands, higher frequencies, and different bandwidths lead to huge differences in coverage, capacity, latency and other network capabilities. To ensure optimal service experience and maximize utilization of frequency band resources, different frequency bands need to be used for different services. Networks need to precisely and quickly identify the best frequency band combination and handover policy and leverage the advantages of frequency bands to deliver the optimal service experience. Networks need to feature optimal multi-dimensional service network efficiency rather than just eMBB spectral efficiency.

Third, network development and user experience: Currently, multiple radio access technologies (RATs) coexist in wireless sites, including macro, pole, and micro sites. The 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks coexist. With Massive MIMO, flexible air interfaces, and other complicated novel technologies, network complexity increases exponentially. In such multi-RAT multi-site heterogeneous networking, user experience may be poor on cell-centric traditional networks due to inconsistent network conditions. Wireless networks with IntelligentRAN will implement user-centric dynamic real-time intelligent clustering through proactive prediction based on user service types and network environments, continuously providing optimal serving cells and enabling networks to evolve from being cell-centric to being user-centric. 

Fourth, energy saving, carbon peaking, and carbon neutrality goals: As diversified services continue to grow in the future, frequency bands and sites will be added in response to surging traffic. Energy consumption will increase linearly. Green and low-carbon development has become a top priority for the entire communications industry and the world. Energy efficiency is a key indicator for evaluating mobile communications networks. Intelligence is therefore introduced to determine the optimal dynamic multi-dimensional coordinated energy saving policy based on traffic and environment, achieving network scenario auto-adaptation, one policy for one site, and multi-network coordination. This maximizes network energy saving benefits while ensuring stable network performance, and strikes an optimal balance between energy consumption and KPIs. It enables the transition from performance-oriented networks to networks that balanced performance and energy consumption

Finally, network O&M evolution: In the era of intelligent connection of everything, toC and toB services carried on mobile networks must always be online. Traditional “responsive” O&M based on post-event work orders cannot meet these requirements. In the future, intelligent analysis is required not only to precisely identify alarms and locate faults, but also to predict software and hardware faults as well as performance deterioration on the network. This helps in proactively rectifying faults and eliminating risks. In this way, zero faults and high reliability of network performance can be realized, making network O&M intelligent and simple.

Empowering Wireless Networks with Intelligence, IntelligentRAN Paves the Way for Autonomous Networks

Digital economy, which has become a strategic goal around the world, relies on the quality of networks. Therefore, in recent years, reaching the ultimate goal of autonomous networks by enabling communications networks with intelligence and automation has become a top priority.

Ma Hongbo said that, similar to levels of automated driving, there are five autonomous network levels evaluated based on the degree of automation and intelligence.

L1 assisted operation and maintenance: function-level automation based on experience 

L2 preliminary autonomous network: function-level automation based on predefined rules

L3 intermediate autonomous network: scenario-level automation based on policy orchestration

L4 advanced autonomous network: network-level automation adaptive to intent

L5 full autonomous network: self-evolving network driven by digital twins

Ma Hongbo noted, “Currently, autonomous network applications in the industry are between L2 and L3. To reach L4 or L5, the focus of networks must shift from automation to intelligence so that wireless networks are capable of self-adaption, self-learning, and self-evolution.”

Huawei has been leading innovation and practice in autonomous networks. Huawei, China Mobile, and other industry partners have jointly developed an innovative open architecture featuring “hierarchical and domain-based autonomy and vertical cross-domain collaboration.” Huawei is also working with the industry to promote standard initiation, technical reserve, and implementation of innovation for autonomous networks.

As the bearer of autonomous driving network (ADN), IntelligentRAN enables the evolution of wireless networks from O&M automation to network intelligence. In IntelligentRAN, Mobile Intelligent Engine (MIE) is introduced on the basis of MBB Automation Engine (MAE). IntelligentRAN achieves intelligent service operation, intelligent network optimization, and intelligent and simplified O&M by collaborating with MIE-realtime (MIE-RT) on the base station side and MIE-non-realtime (MIE-NRT) on the network side in data, modeling, and decision-making. IntelligentRAN provides all-scenario key capabilities for reaching L4.

Stepping Up to a New Level, from O&M Automation to Network Intelligence

Nowadays, many more operators have incorporated autonomous networks into their strategic blueprints. What progress has Huawei made in the wireless field?

Ma Hongbo elaborated that Huawei MAE, a wireless network management system developed based on extensive technology experience, injects automation and intelligence into network planning, construction, operation, optimization, and maintenance. In addition, Huawei has carried out joint innovation with many operators, producing significant results.

Intelligent deployment: Operator in South Korea has pioneered in applying intelligence technologies to newly deployed 5G networks to tackle new challenges, improving network O&M efficiency and network performance. Huawei MAE Radio Express provides automatic neighboring cell planning and intelligent Massive MIMO broadcast beam optimization, with professional service experience. This ensures efficiency and basic network quality at the initial stage of 5G network construction. After the initial parameters of a new 5G site are optimized, the throughput can be increased by 20%.

Intelligent O&M: In routine O&M scenarios, a huge number of alarms are reported every day. Traditional manual processing is inefficient, and a large number of work orders are created. Troubleshooting is time-consuming and the network issues may have a large scope of impact. Huawei and operators in China jointly explored alarm noise reduction methods, streamlined fault management systems, and developed a work order dispatching system by using Alarm Turbo, delivering all-round alarm noise reduction from fault discovery to fault recovery. Alarm Turbo decreased work orders by 16.7%, greatly enhancing operators’ routine maintenance efficiency.

Intelligent energy saving: Huawei’s intelligent online energy saving solution helps operators maximize energy efficiency while maintaining stable network performance. An innovation test jointly conducted by operator in China and Huawei shows that in the 5G full-band scenario, PowerStar2.0 reduced power consumption by 25% with KPIs remaining stable.

Intelligent services: In toH scenarios, Huawei WTTx Suite helped an operator in Cambodia reduce CPE allocation duration from 50 hours to 1 hour, significantly improving CPE allocation efficiency.

In toB scenarios, 5GtoB Suite applies autonomous driving network capabilities to E2E 5GtoB network scenarios. Modeling based on AI learning empowers precise network resource planning. Visualized E2E O&M makes quick and intelligent fault analysis possible. In the innovation test in China, Huawei helped the operator improve its network planning efficiency by 60%. Huawei also worked with operators in China on the intelligent campus project, improving campus network O&M efficiency by 70%.

The tide of intelligence is rising. Starting with 2G, 3G, 4G and then on to 5G, mobile communications has witnessed a lot of innovation. Huawei’s every innovation marks its dedicated efforts to make technical breakthroughs. IntelligentRAN enables autonomous networks. It will empower industries, accelerate industry transformation, and promote sustainable development of the mobile industry and a digital world.