What is the AI-RAN Alliance?

By Catherine Sbeglia Nin September 17, 2024

Collected at: https://www.rcrwireless.com/20240917/fundamentals/what-is-the-ai-ran-alliance

The main mission of the AI-RAN Alliance is to ‘weave AI right into the fabric of the radio access network’

Officially launched in February 2024, the AI-RAN Alliance is a group of technology and telecom leaders focused on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into cellular technology to further advance radio access network (RAN) technology and mobile networks. According to Alex Jinsung Choi, chair of the AI-RAN Alliance and principal fellow of SoftBank Corp.’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology, the main mission of the group is to “weave AI right into the fabric of the radio access network.

“We are not just about making networks faster and more flexible, we want to transform them into self-organization, self-optimizing, self-managing systems that can handle real-time changes and anticipate maintenance and efficiently manage resources,” he told RCR Wireless News. He added that unlike traditional standard bodies, such as the 3GPP, that focus on standardizing network interfaces, the AI-RAN Alliance revolves around “real-world” AI applications.

The AI-RAN Alliance is comprised of three working groups:

AI-for-RAN: This group is looking at how AI can enhance the performance of the radio access network (RAN), diving deep into how AI can improve efficiency, boost capacity and achieve key performance targets.

AI-on-RAN: This group is addressing challenges around running AI applications directly on radio access networks. “With explosion of AI and gen AI applications… the demand on our networks are increasing,” said Choi. “This group is benchmarking to make sure how networks can handle these demands without compromising things like latency and security.”

AI-and-RAN: The final group is tasked with exploring how using the same infrastructure to run both RAN workload and also AI workload simultaneously will open up new revenue streams for telcos. “This is about making the most of what we have … to support AI applications while still managing our networks core functions,” said Choi. “The outcome from this group is to show us how to increase resource utilization and open up new revenue streams by hosting various AI applications on the same platforms that run our network functions.

“AI is perfectly poised to revolutionize the RAN,” Choi said. “In the AI-RAN Alliance, we are seeing a major shift towards integrating AI directly into RAN operations on shared computing platforms including GPUs and NPUs… We are looking at networks that can configure, optimize and repair themselves with minimal human intervention. This could lead to revolutionary communications technologies that change how we interact with the digital world.”

Softbank is a founding member of the AI-RAN Alliance, along with Arm, DeepSig, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Northeastern University, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, the University of Tokyo and T-Mobile US.