Partner Content - Huawei injects intelligence into 5.5G core to boost carrier monetization

Partner Content

Huawei released its 5.5G intelligence core solution at Mobile World Congress. George Gao, President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, asserted that the solution’s various integrated capabilities and innovations can “fast track the commercial use of 5.5G for operators in 2024”.

George was speaking at Huawei Product & Solution Launch 2024 event at MWC, where he said that enabling “intelligent connectivity” will be vital if carriers are to deliver 10 Gbps end-user experiences in an operationally efficient way in the 5.5G era, as well as provide new ARPU-boosting services and customized bundles.

“As 5G scales up, it is bringing more business value and entering more service scenarios,” explained George. “This in turn poses higher requirements on the network.”

5.5G core attributes

The 5.5G intelligence core incorporates service intelligence, network intelligence, and O&M intelligence. Huawei summarizes it as a N.I.D.U solution. N stands for New Calling-Advanced; I is Intelligent Personalized Experience (IPE); D is Digital Assistant and Digital Expert (DAE); and U is found in the intelligent Unified Distributed Gateway (UDG).

Start with New Calling-Advanced. In China, the first iteration of 5G New Calling was commercially launched last year, enabled by Huawei, and offers high-definition and immersive audio and video communications. With the subsequent addition of multiple New Calling services, such as visualized voice calling, real-time translation and “fun calling”, the service has proven extremely popular. Now deployed in 31 provinces in China it serves close to 50 million users. George pointed out that New Calling has also been verified in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, and is set to be commercialized in these regions this year.

New Calling upgrades are on the way, flagged George, which can all be enabled by Huawei’s 5.5G intelligence core. “New Calling-Advanced is taking us into a multi-modal communication era and can empower operators to reshape their own business.”

Significant progress has been made in upgrading New Calling-Advanced interactions. “We have worked with operators to develop Interactive Customer Center, which will be rolled out by the first quarter in 2024,” continued George. “It allows users to access account information query, handwritten digital signature, remote broadband troubleshooting, and more services during a call. This helps users to complete their services by just one call, greatly improving efficiency.”

Upgraded intelligence for New Calling-Advanced is provided by the introduction of Multi-modal Communication Function (MCF), which allows users to control digital avatars through voice during calls, delivering a more personalized calling experience. An enterprise, said George, can also customize their own avatar as an “enterprise ambassador” to promote their branding.

IPE and DAE

The IPE solution, said George, is an industry necessity. “Now 5.5G is on the horizon, we need to realize traffic monetization on mobile broadband networks,” he said. Specifically, the IPE is designed to bridge three technical gaps: inability to assess user experience in real time; no dynamic optimization; and no-closed-loop operation.

“Huawei IPE solution can guide operators from traffic monetization to experience monetization.” Said George. “It helps operators add experience privileges to service packages and implement differentiated experience monetization.”

Empowered by the multi-modal large model, the “intelligent-centric” DAE is designed to reduce O&M workload and improve O&M efficiency. George highlighted that 80% of trouble tickets can be automatically processed, and that intent-driven O&M is enabled.

Enhanced O&M capability can also help operators tackle skill gaps and long training cycles. “Usually, it takes over five years to cultivate experts in a single domain,” said George. “But now the multi-modal O&M large model can be trained and updated within just weeks. Those cross-domain issues can be easily resolved with the multi-modal ‘chain of thought’”.

The industry’s first intelligent UDG

The intelligent UDG, asserted George, is a unique Huawei innovation. “The user plane function on the core network usually processes and forwards one service flow using one vCPU,” said George. “But as heavy-traffic services increase, such as 2K or 4K HD video and live streaming, microbursts and elephant flows frequently occur. It is then more likely that the vCPU is overloaded, and package loss occurs.”

The next-generation intelligent UDG addressees these issues, supporting 10 Gbps per flow and enabling what George called a “superior service experience”.

“For heavy-traffic services, the Intelligent UDG divides their service flows into multiple flowlets,” explained George. “These flowlets are distributed to available vCPUs in the vCPU pool. After service processing, the flowlets are aggregated and then forwarded efficiently with the original packet sequence.”

“The future is already here,” concluded George. “The N.I.D.U enables intelligent connectivity of everything.”