PRESS RELEASE: Most operators around the world aim to deploy high-quality level 4 (L4) autonomous networks by 2025. How can they use reliable technologies and solutions to pull this off in such a short amount of time? China Mobile has piloted Huawei’s universal intelligent service processing units (UISPs) on the radio access network (RAN) side to enable intelligent communications and smart base stations in multiple provinces. This has transformed RANs from pure pipe nodes into sensing and decision-making nodes. Service sensing, digital twins, and multi-dimensional decision-making capabilities enable 5G-A networks to intelligently optimize user experiences, simplify O&M, and improve energy efficiency, paving the way towards L4 autonomous RANs. China Mobile and Huawei have deployed more than 80,000 intelligentRAN base stations in China, and in doing so, have opened up a new space for differentiated experiences.
Breakthrough 1
Intelligent Experience Optimization Helps Operators Monetize Differentiated Experiences Based on Multi-Dimensional 5G-A Capabilities
As traffic and revenue growth are slowing down, operators are urgently looking for new ways to monetize their offerings. 5G-A’s large bandwidth and low latency are helping operators go from traffic monetization to experience monetization. However, conventional cell-level service assurance is falling short of the requirements for differentiated experiences, so user-level assurance must be implemented for different services.
According to China Mobile’s pilots in multiple provinces, Huawei’s UISPs make networks capable of real-time sensing, modeling and prediction, and multi-dimensional decision-making. As such, the networks can accurately sense the quality of service experiences and adaptively schedule resources based on experience requirements (such as speed and latency). This ensures that the experiences for each service are optimal and eliminates issues such as unclear video images and frame freezing during live streaming.
UISPs have proved to be key to boosting the quality of short-video-related experiences. The pilots have shown that in shopping malls, residential areas, and other scenarios requiring continuous coverage, short video assurance has significantly decreased the average latency of short videos. For instance, China Mobile Hubei’s pilot in Wuhan found that the proportion of grids with high latency for short videos fell by 16%. Onsite verification by China Mobile Shandong at the Baotu Spring Lantern Fair also showed that the latency of short videos decreased by 41% and the proportion of HD short-video streams increased by 23.4%.
UISPs have also played an important role in increasing the proportion of HD live streams. For example, China Mobile Henan has piloted the 5G-A intelligentRAN base station solution. The solution has increased the proportion of HD live-streaming users by 14% and the average uplink single-user-perceived speed by 36%. In another pilot in Shenyang, Liaoning, the proportion of HD live-streaming users and the uplink user-perceived speed increased by 11.8% and 12%, respectively. This has been a great boost for the development of the local influencer economy.
Flexible service assurance can significantly improve service experiences. With the add-on packages released by China Mobile, intelligent assurance will be available for user-level and service-level differentiated experiences.
Breakthrough 2
Intelligent and Simplified O&M Improves Efficiency and Accuracy at a Lower Cost and Increases Network Satisfaction Rates
5G-A will lead to more frequency bands, more technology deployments, more diverse services and site forms, and more complex network structures. Its structural challenges increase system integration and configuration requirements and greatly complicate O&M to the point where issues cannot be solved with manual O&M alone.
Networks need to be able to accurately detect service problems and provide optimization suggestions. In the pilots, UISPs based on digital twins have enabled a high-precision service-grid experience sandbox, which supports poor-QoE node tracing and root cause analysis. The units have also used foundation models to enable human-machine interaction and proactively detect and recommend to-be-optimized parameters. This transforms O&M from a passive process into a predictive and preventive one, which significantly improves efficiency.
The pilot of China Mobile Beijing showed that the complaint source-tracing process, from indicator evaluation to solution formulation, optimization, and effect observation, was shortened from one to two days to one to two hours. The onsite test workload has been considerably reduced and the complaint handling efficiency improved.
Breakthrough 3
Intelligent Energy Efficiency Improvement Strikes a Balance Between Performance and Energy Savings
The amount of energy consumed by RANs is likely to increase rapidly as 5G-A network traffic surges, and bandwidths and the number of sites, frequency bands, and channels increase. How can operators achieve a balance between traffic and service growth and carbon emission reduction? Constrained by unified policies and parameter configurations, conventional energy-saving methods are unable to accurately match services and the energy-saving level and time, so they cannot ensure high-priority services.
A comprehensive analysis of the pilots found that Huawei’s UISPs were able to provide refined energy consumption management based on site- and time-specific policies. By associating services with energy-saving features and taking into account service distribution in the time, frequency, space, and power domains, as well as network load changes, Huawei’s UISPs have enabled comprehensive service orchestration with near-lossless performance while achieving preset RAN indicators. As such, they are able to minimize the energy consumption of site-wide devices under light loads and maximize their energy efficiency under heavy loads, thus delivering “0 Bit 0 Watt”.
The pilots in multiple provinces have all shown that this solution significantly decreases energy consumption while guaranteeing network coverage quality and user experiences. For example, the verification of 5G-A intelligentRAN base stations by China Mobile Beijing showed that energy consumption fell by 10%. Estimates suggest that if the base stations are deployed across Beijing, carbon emissions will be reduced by 40,000 tons per year, which is equivalent to planting 21,879 trees. China Mobile Hubei also conducted energy-saving tests in Wuhan. The results showed that energy consumption fell by 10.4% on average, while network KPIs remained stable. According to test results from China Mobile Anhui in Hefei, the energy consumption of local base stations fell by 10.8%, and the average daily energy consumption per base station fell by about 4 kWh.
Ushering in a New Era of Intelligent 5G-A Monetization
By deeply integrating intelligent technologies into services, O&M, and energy savings, China Mobile has been able to achieve remarkable results in their pilots of Huawei’s UISPs. This demonstrates the significant value that 5G-A intelligentRAN base stations add when being used to optimize experience, energy efficiency, and maintenance efficiency. This will also unleash the potential of 5G-A in the evolution towards L4 autonomous networks and benefit both operators and mobile network users alike.