PRESS RELEASE: In the spring of 2024, in the city of Jinan, Shandong province, China Unicom Shandong and Huawei completed the large-scale verification of China’s first embodied intelligence system.
These base stations are integrated with universal intelligent service processing units that perform intelligent service recognition and decision-making for communications processing. Boasting a huge potential for improving the video and live streaming experience and making HD video services more accessible, RAN intelligence is becoming a new trend in the wireless network space. The 2024 Baotu Spring Lantern Fair marked the first use of embodied intelligence system for key event assurance. The result showed a 41% shorter latency for short videos and an 18.5% increase in HD live streaming as a proportion of all live streaming.
Globally, alongside the rapid development of mobile networks, services and their experience requirements are further diversifying. This highlights the urgency of building intelligence into the fabric of mobile networks. Universal intelligent service processing units enable base stations to identify services in milliseconds with an accuracy of over 99%, making it possible to provide differentiated experience for short video, live streaming, and cloud gaming.
China Unicom Shandong is one of the operators taking the initiative to implement digital intelligence on its network, and embodied intelligence system provide it a new option to imbue networks with the new capabilities required to fulfill emerging service requirements.
The Baotu Spring Lantern Fair is a perennial highlight on Shandong’s cultural calendar, and a treasured part of the province’s intangible cultural heritage. Every year, during Spring Festival celebrations, the Baotu Spring Park hosts a spectacular lantern show. When night falls, the park is illuminated by elaborate lanterns, and their light is reflected in the water of a gurgling spring.
This year marked the 43rd such annual display. The theme was “Welcoming a peaceful and prosperous Year of the Dragon at the world’s first spring”, and hundreds of thousands of visitors flocked to the Baotu Spring Park to witness the event first hand, and some of them brought the spectacle to thousands more people via short video and live streaming platforms.
These are the exact circumstances under which concentrated bursts of data traffic can threaten to overwhelm the mobile networks, but not so in Jinan this year. The new embodied intelligence system helped China Unicom Shandong handle even the highest peaks of data traffic.
As visitors poured into the park and user concurrency and demand for bandwidth soared, the intelligence system distinguished short videos and live streaming sessions from other traffic. Downlink delay-based adaptive scheduling, smart uplink preallocation, and precise multi-band delay-based scheduling were supported to reduce latency for these services and enable more users to enjoy HD video quality.
During the event, the physical resource block (PRB) usage averaged 28.29% and peaked at 90%. Despite such heavy traffic load, the latency decreased from 50.1 ms to 29.3 ms, and the proportion of short videos that could be watched in HD increased by 23.4%. Thanks to the optimization of uplink scheduling weights, mobility, and beam management by intelligent base stations, the proportion of live streams in HD quality rose by 18.5%, and all this was achieved without impacting user experience on other services.
China Unicom Shandong has always strived to provide a faster, better, and smarter mobile network experience. Looking into the future, it will continue to expand the deployment of RAN intelligence technologies and verify their value in optimal experience, maintenance efficiency, and energy savings to better address the changing needs of its users.