LIVE FROM MWC25 BARCELONA: Verification tests by SoftBank and partners demonstrated network capacity can be increased without deploying new base stations, a feat the operator indicated meant AI for RAN has the potential to reduce the need for fresh infrastructure investment.

Ryuji Wakikawa, head of the company’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology, explained in a briefing its AI for RAN work clearly showed the impact AI can have on enhancing RAN performance.

He added being able to achieve substantial improvements without requiring changes to communication specifications for AI utilisation “suggests the potential for major evolution of our infrastructure through AI innovation”. 

The operator recently completed verification tests on three use cases, covering uplink channel interpolation, sounding reference signals prediction and AI-driven medium access control scheduling, for improving wireless performance.

The initiative, jointly conducted with Nvidia and Fujitsu, enhanced channel estimation accuracy for signals received at base stations, known as uplink channel interpolation, with the operator confirming uplink user throughput improved by about 20 per cent on smartphones.

On the opening day of MWC25, SoftBank issued a raft of press releases related to AI RAN developments.

The operator and Red Hat jointly developed a platform which monitors energy usage and optimises power consumption for virtualised RAN and AI applications operating in AI-RAN data centres. This enables its distributed AI-RAN offering Aitras to dynamically allocate resources to AI applications based on power usage and other factors.

Working with Fujitsu, the operator claimed it completed the implementation of central unit functions on Nvidia’s Grace CPU Superchip platform to accelerate the commercialisation of Aitras.

SoftBank also partnered with Nokia to integrate a new function into its Aitras Orchestrator, which allows AI and virtualised RAN to coexist on a single server, demonstrating benefits such as increased server resource utilisation and the ability to significantly reduce server downtime when switching roles.