5.5G Core: How Does Intelligence Make a Difference?

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    Apr 09, 2024

    5G has fulfilled its mission of enabling connectivity of everything. As the foundation of the digital economy, it has redefined what communications mean for billions of users, tens of millions of households, and thousands of industries. As 5G continues to scale up, it is unlocking greater business value and penetrating more service scenarios, imposing higher requirements on networks.

    To address these requirements and expedite the transition towards 5.5G, we need new momentum. And we believe this momentum will come in the form of new services, new experiences, new operation modes, and new O&M approaches.

    New services: Take video services as an example. New video services, like HD video, are on the rise and now account for more than 60% of all video services by volume. At the same time, we are seeing an explosion in new terminals. Currently, there are more than 20 terminal models capable of 3D videos or glasses-free 3D in the market, including TVs, tablets, and mobile phones. As artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) technology continues to grow and more XR devices emerge, there will soon be many different applications for immersive experiences. Such services will require a rate of up to 10 Gbps and a latency of 20 ms or less.



    New experiences: As the transmission capability over the air interface is taken to new levels in 5.5G, users will experience a huge leap in maximum transmission rate: from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps.

    New operation modes: With the introduction of intelligence, mobile communication networks will be reshaped to provide differentiated experiences instead of homogeneous connections, transitioning from service-based operations to experience-based operations.

    New O&M approaches: The focus of O&M is shifting from tools to large models, with the aim of improving O&M efficiency and network stability.

    Driven by this momentum, 5.5G will exert a far-reaching influence on future communications technologies. We have noticed that intelligence is a key feature in the development of 5.5G, which is why we released the 5.5G intelligent core solution. The intelligence of the core network is reflected in three aspects: 

    • Service intelligence
    • Network intelligence
    • O&M intelligence

    These three forms of intelligence help operators cope with changes in users, services, communications models, and networks in the 5.5G era. They also assist operators in rebuilding service entry, redefining business models, and reshaping cloud-based O&M approaches.

    Service Intelligence: Rebuilding the service entry point

    The rapid development of intelligence-based technologies has pushed content generation from professionally-generated content (PGC) and user-generated content (UGC) to AIGC. At the same time, as new XR devices appear, previously single-modal communications have evolved into multi-modal communications.

    New Calling is an innovation with service intelligence at its core, and was first commercialized in China.


     

    Related: New Calling: Bringing Our World Closer Together

    After its launch last year, New Calling has been deployed across 31 provinces in China, and currently has more than 6 million users. As part of New Calling, a series of innovative services have been commercially released, such as visualized voice calling, real-time translation, and fun calling. These services allow multi-modal conversions, including speech-to-text, speech-to-image, and gesture-to-animation conversions, enabling users to enjoy fun and immersive interactions during calls.

    Besides these novel experiences, service intelligence also helps operators rebuild the service entry point, transforming voice-only operations into content-based operations and voice and video calling into multi-modal communications with immersive XR applications.

    Huawei continues to innovate in this field, and has recently launched the real-time voice driven avatar application for New Calling. Leveraging real-time rendering technology, this application enables users to customize their own avatars, and will soon allow enterprises to create their virtual brand ambassadors.

    Network Intelligence: Redefining business models

    There are three technical gaps holding back operators from monetizing experience on MBB networks: service experience cannot be assessed in real time, services cannot be dynamically optimized, and closed-loop management is not realized for service operations.

    To bridge these gaps, Huawei proposed the Assessment, Optimization, and Monetization (A.O.M) concept, implementing it through the Intelligent Personalized Experience (IPE) solution.

    1. Assessment: Service experience can be assessed in real time, laying a solid foundation for experience monetization.

    2. Optimization: Service experience can be dynamically optimized, helping to maximize network efficiency.

    3. Monetization: After service guarantee is completed, an experience report is immediately sent to the user, so that they can easily check the service status.

    The network intelligence currently empowered by A.O.M helps operators better monetize services based on differentiated experiences. This is not purely a technology innovation — it comprehensively upgrades operators' business concepts and patterns as well as reshaping business models.

    O&M Intelligence: Reshaping cloud-based O&M approaches

    O&M intelligence has become integral to efficient telecom network operations, driving the evolution from automatic deployment to end-to-end automatic delivery, and then to rule-driven and large model-based O&M.

    The Digital Assistant & Digital Expert (DAE) draws on such an innovative and intelligent O&M approach. With a GUI-based visualized topology and multi-modal large model, the DAE redefines core O&M workflows. When monitoring and troubleshooting network problems such as link, cloud resource, or license faults, the digital expert can analyze faults as soon as the digital assistant detects them. In the future, troubleshooting is expected to be further automated. At an FOA site (for POC) for an operator in China, the DAE has handled 80% of trouble tickets, saving 750 person-days per month.

    The launch of the 5.5G intelligent core network marks not only a leap in technical capabilities, but also a big step for the entire communications industry in shifting towards intelligent, efficient, and personalized services. As the 5.5G core network develops and extends to more scenarios, it will make the communications network more intelligent, reliable, and efficient, bringing brand new communications experiences to users, and opening up new business models and growth opportunities for operators.

     


    Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.

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