How is cloud-native 5G laying the foundation for AI-native 6G?

By Catherine Sbeglia Nin September 4, 2024

Collected at: https://www.rcrwireless.com/20240904/fundamentals/how-is-cloud-native-5g-laying-the-foundation-for-ai-native-6g

Blue Planet VP: ‘The most important part of 5G that plays forward in 6G is that it’s dynamic’

6G is often described as AI-native, which means that AI touches every aspect of the network, from planning to optimization; however, in a previous conversation with RCR Wireless News, McKinsey and Company Senior Partner Tomás Lajous acknowledged that being cloud-native is a requirement for being AI-native. (He said, too, that operators have yet to become cloud-native — but that’s not what we’re talking about today).

“The notion of having a cloud-native telco, I think, is part and parcel to having an AI-native telco,” Lajous said. “If we were to start a telecom company from scratch today, what would be the best way to put it together? And that’s where we landed on the best way to put it together is by having AI at the core. And that means having AI assist essentially every decision and operating model, and a culture that embraces AI in order to do so, all the way from marketing and call centers to the network.” 

But achieving this, he continued, relies on a “very deep technical architecture that goes with it. And the best way to do [that] is by bringing in the cloud.” In this way and in this context, cloud is “required” for AI.

By embracing cloud-native, Blue Planet VP’s Kailem Anderson told RCR Wireless News more recently, 5G is striving to be more elastic, flexible and portable. “The most important part of 5G that plays forward in 6G is that it’s dynamic, which means that whether it’s for a consumer or a business service, the customer expects an on-demand experience,” he said, adding that this required the entire software stack that supports 5G to be “reimagined.” This, he continued, brought upon the “rapid acceleration and transformation of the software stack,” introducing new technologies like AI-driven automation. As such, the concepts of AI and cloud-native — as well as network disaggregation — get “clumped together” for Anderson because it’s all about taking a data-driven approach to enable the delivery of real-time customer experiences.

Alex Jinsung Choi, chair of the AI-RAN Alliance and principal fellow of SoftBank Corp.’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology, agreed with Anderson, commenting, “The shift towards cloud-native architecture and disaggregation of network functions over the last several years in 5G has laid a robust foundation for the advent of 6G.”

Choi added, as well, that the flexibility and modularity of cloud-native and disaggregated systems allow telcos to integrate AI features “seamlessly, ensuring that the networks are not just more powerful but also responsive to market dynamics.”

Cloud-native, but also software-defined

Another principle of 5G that adds to its dynamic nature is the use of software-defined networking (SDN), which allows data to move easily between distributed locations. This, of course, is key for cloud applications. The establishment of SDN in 5G, according to Ronnie Vasishta, who is responsible for the telecom business, strategy and products at Nvidia, has made it so that 6G “all of a sudden doesn’t seem like that big of a challenge.”

He explained the transition from 5G to 6G further: “If you have software definition, as you’re going form 5G to 5G-Advanced and you’re including ultra-reliable low-latency communication [and] precision positioning… all of those are software upgrades.” A software-defined infrastructure will also present telcos with the opportunity to leverage that hardware for other things, said Vasishta. “So you can also put hardware on the base station, in a mobile switching office, you can put it in a centralized cloud — same software, same hardware, it just scales it.”

In other words, telcos don’t have to build completely new hardware or install new sites for 6G.  “The hardware becomes upgradable from 5G, 5G-A and then onto 6G, but software remains the same,” he stated.

The Nvidia 6G Cloud Research Platform

While AI is perhaps the buzzword for 6G, cloud is still just as buzzy. Acting on this fact, Nvidia developed the 6G Research Cloud Platform, which aims to democratize wireless research. In a press statement, Nvidia said the platform combines the power of cloud and AI, enabling “telcos [to] unlock the full potential of 6G and pave the way for the future of wireless technology.” Organizations can use the platform to accelerate the development of 6G technologies that will connect trillions of devices with the cloud infrastructures to support a wide range of advanced use cases, said the company.

The platform has three fundamental building blocks:

• Aerial Omniverse Digital Twin for 6G: A reference application and developer sample that enables physically accurate simulations of complete 6G systems, from a single tower to city scale.
• Aerial CUDA-Accelerated RAN: A software-defined, full-RAN stack, offering increased flexibility for researchers to customize, program and test 6G networks in real time.
• Sionna Neural Radio Framework: A framework that provides seamless integration with popular frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow, leveraging NVIDIA GPUs for generating and capturing data and training AI and machine learning models at scale. This also includes Sionna, Nvidia’s research tool for AI/ML-based wireless simulations.

Early platform adopters include Ansys, Arm, ETH Zurich, Fujitsu, Keysight, Nokia, Northeastern University, Rohde & Schwarz, Samsung, SoftBank Corp. and Viavi.