Ericsson and SoftBank Corp. announced progress and achievements in their ongoing joint research and development collaboration on AI-RAN integration and agreed to sign an MoU to further extend its collaboration. This partnership aims to explore the convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Radio Access Network (RAN) technologies
Since the start of the collaboration, Ericsson and SoftBank have successfully made progress in several key areas, demonstrating the potential of AI-RAN integration to transform telecommunications. Achievements include:
• Demonstrating a prototype of Ericsson Cloud RAN software running on the Grace CPU of NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip.
• Defining an architecture that enables the orchestration of both RAN and AI applications on the same infrastructure.
Building upon the successful progress of the collaboration, the two companies have agreed to expand their research:
• Exploring the feasibility of offloading selected RAN functions to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) using NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip platform.
• Prototyping the orchestration of AI and RAN workloads, which can be achieved coordinating SoftBank’s orchestrator from their AITRAS solution and Ericsson’s open network management and automation platform
• Exploring optimal AI placement of computation for robotic applications using Ericsson’s compute offloading framework
With the expansion of this joint research, it is anticipated that the coordination of SoftBank’s and Ericsson’s development efforts will lead to significant advancements in RAN and mobile networks, as well as in the robotics industry.
Jawad Manssour, President and Representative Director, Ericsson Japan says: «The progress made in our collaboration with SoftBank underscores our commitment to pioneering innovations in telecommunications. These achievements mark significant milestones in our journey to empower communications service providers with more efficient and versatile networks.»
Hideyuki Tsukuda, Executive Vice President and CTO at SoftBank Corp., says: «Building on our previous activities, this expansion into joint research and development between SoftBank and Ericsson toward future network deployment represents an important step forward in the evolution of AI-RAN technology. We will build SoftBank’s infrastructure with AI-RAN and evolve it into next-generation communication infrastructure that supports AI.»
Ericsson and SoftBank are among the prominent industry leaders who formed the AI-RAN Alliance, unveiled at the Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2024. This alliance is a new collaborative effort to integrate AI into cellular technology, with the goal of progressing RAN technology and mobile networks.
Above, Ericsson HQ / image credited to Ericsson
