Recently, at the ZTE 5G Summit, Dr. Bai Gang, Vice President of ZTE, published the theme of "Continuous Innovation Promoting 5G Value Growth". In his speech, he mentioned several innovative solutions of ZTE, which can bring significant value to the development of 5G and industry partners. RCR Wireless interviewed Dr. Bai Gang based on the main points of the speech.

Q1: In your introduction, you mentioned that ZTE is the first company in the industry to launch an intelligent orchestration solution based on artificial intelligence. Can you share more information about what the goal is and how it works?

This year, ZTE launched the industry's first intelligent orchestration solution-Radio Composer. Based on the AI ​​engine, through the BBU's built-in intelligence and multi-layer computing capabilities in the wireless network, it provides multi-dimensional network perception and optimizes user experience and network efficiency. Radio Composer enriches the reliable and resilient 5G network by adaptively managing its resources to track and match service requirements and AI.

Within the solution, user orchestration takes users as the orchestration object to realize intelligent user guidance and scheduling. From the statistics of field applications, the average throughput of cell edge users can be increased by more than 300%, and the handover delay can be reduced by more than 50%. Network orchestration takes network resources as the orchestration object, and realizes the orchestration of spectrum, frame structure, and beam. By activating the network orchestration function, the spectrum payload and spectrum utilization are significantly improved, the network payload is accelerated by 30%, and operation and maintenance costs are reduced by 50%. It is a powerful tool for operators to develop and operate 5G networks in the post-5G era. ZTE has verified the solution with a number of operators and achieved excellent results.

In addition, smart orchestration is an evolving solution. Currently supports user scheduling and network scheduling. In the future, we will explore more features, such as joint orchestration, intent-driven orchestration, etc., to achieve comprehensive network utilization efficiency and user experience optimization.

Q2: You talked about the unique NodeEngine solution in the industry. Can you tell us more about its applications and benefits?

ZTE’s unique NodeEngine is the industry’s first and only solution with a built-in base station edge computing engine. Only one card can be easily inserted into the existing 5G BBU, which can maximize the use of existing 5G network resources and provide enterprises with private network capabilities. The rapid deployment of one-hour configuration and activation is no longer a dream. Although this solution is based on only one board, it has a relatively large capacity. It supports 10Gbps traffic offloading. At the same time, it supports the edge QoS function and guarantees the service SLA. The NodeEngine self-service portal can be provided to enterprises to manage the 5G private network and service performance in real time after obtaining the authorization of the operator.

A typical example of NodeEngine is Sany Changshu 5G Smart Factory in China. In this case, 5G-enabled machine vision helps factories realize functions such as intelligent material cutting, multi-system collaborative operation, unmanned dangerous production, automatic assembly, and intelligent quality inspection. This reduces labor costs by 64% and product defect rates by 14%. 5G intelligent storage improves the connection quality of unmanned AGV trolleys, ensuring a delay of no more than 10ms. It has realized the high-speed and stable operation of AGV transportation operations and dispatch control, increased the efficiency of warehouse management by 50%, and reduced the overall cost by 20%-30%. The success of projects such as the Changshu plant has allowed Sany Heavy Industry to truly feel the benefits of digital transformation. It is expected that after the digital upgrade, equipment downtime will be reduced by 50%, and equipment utilization will increase from 35% to 75%.

This kind of efficiency improvement is not uncommon in 5G industry applications using ZTE’s NodeEngine solution. ZTE has extensively cooperated with more than a dozen industries and more than 70 commercial projects.

Q3: ZTE's AIVO solution is very interesting. Can you elaborate on this solution?

With the development of 5G, operators are facing three major operational challenges: troubleshooting in complex networks is difficult, problems between different services are difficult to define, and individual requirements are difficult to meet.

The AIVO digital operation solution based on big data and artificial intelligence realizes data-driven operation innovation, provides more than 150 artificial intelligence algorithms, identifies more than 15,000 services, and truly realizes insight into services and users. AIVO is based on an intelligent digital platform and can help operators in the following aspects: precise planning, intelligent operation and market development. Taking intelligent operation and maintenance as an example, AIVO supports visual AI model training, proactively predicts and prevents network interruptions, and realizes automatic diagnosis and recovery through intelligent fault management, thereby improving operation and maintenance efficiency by 20%.

So far, AIVO has been applied to more than 70 networks around the world and has won the trust of customers.

Q4: Before you talked about some innovative solutions, they are available in the current 5G network. What about the future? What is your view on future solutions such as 5G-Advanced?

One thing that quickly came to my mind was ZTE MetaRadio, which uses Reconfigurable Intelligent MetaSurface to improve 5G network performance in a cost-effective manner. It is a 6G technology that has been brought to the 5G Advanced era. Just as ZTE did with Pre5G Massive MIMO, it brought 5G technology into the 4G era. Generally, wireless channels are considered passive or fixed by electromagnetic signals reflected by ordinary materials. However, with ZTE MetaRadio, the wireless channel can be regarded as Active or Re-configurable. Therefore, the performance of the entire wireless system can be greatly improved. For example, if we put MetaRadio in a 5G network, the potential benefits include reducing the number of sites and power consumption by improving site coverage (especially millimeter waves), and improving user experience due to better coverage.

Another important area is AI (artificial intelligence). There is no doubt that artificial intelligence is no stranger to us. But what is new and interesting is that artificial intelligence is expected to become the core function of the 5G Advanced network. Artificial intelligence and wireless technology will develop and evolve together. 5G advanced networks will evolve to better support artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence will also be designed to further enhance 5G advanced networks. The position of artificial intelligence can be diverse, on the radio network, on the core network, on the edge, and on the terminal. And their joint processing can potentially improve system performance and user experience and bring more services.

These are just two interesting areas. We are carrying out 5G Advanced from multiple areas such as architecture level, device level and solution level.

Q5: In your speech, you summarized the 3-E concept and the value that 5G brings to customers. Can you clarify this concept more?

First of all, the B2C market is the foundation of wireless and 5G. However, the wireless B2C market is quite mature. The main task of the operator is to maximize the value of the network. Secondly, the B2B market will bring new sources of income to 5G, which has huge potential. Therefore, the key task of 5G here is to create new value for the B2B market in order to profit from new business flows. Finally, wireless communication has always been a continuous innovation effort, so 5G will definitely further evolve to 5G Advanced and 6G. But we are not innovating for the sake of innovation. Our innovation aims to maximize and create new value for our customers.

Therefore, we came up with 3-E. Expansion, enhancement, efficiency.

Since 1982, RCR Wireless News has been providing wireless and mobile industry news, insights and analysis to professionals, decision makers, policy makers, analysts and investors in the mobile and wireless industries.

© 2021-2022 RCR Wireless News