Wind River, a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems,announced that it will be showcasing with Encora, a digital engineering services company, an advanced AI automation of 5G Open RAN operations at Mobile World Congress. According to Gartner, by 2025, at least 40% of BU operations among communications service providers (CSPs) will be digitized and automated using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions, as compared to 15% at the end of 2022.*
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Building on our extensive automation and analytics experience with our Wind River Studio Operator offering, we are thrilled to team with Encora to demonstrate AI automation of 5G O-RAN operations at Mobile World Congress.
The industry at large, experienced in legacy technologies such as analytics and ML, has become energized by the possibility of leveraging AI and large language models (LLMs) for increased operations automation, enabling reduction of OpEx in running these large networks as well as reduced time-to-resolution of field events, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing downtime.
“Service providers globally are experiencing technical complexity and high cost in managing their widely distributed and disaggregated networks. Virtualization in both the core networks and edge, such as Open RAN, have further increased this difficulty and cost,” said Paul Miller, chief technology officer, Wind River. “Wind River is highly experienced in this space, having offered automation and analytics solutions as part of our Wind River Studio Operator offering. In fact, operators have been able to employ these products to enable up to 90% reduction in staff hours for deployment of edge systems. We are excited to showcase this game-changing technology with Encora at Mobile World Congress.”
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The Wind River and Encora demonstration shows an AI LLM interacting with live deployed cloud infrastructure representative of a core-to-edge service provider network. The demonstration allows live querying via the AI of various network elements, live cooperative debugging with the AI of alarms and configuration issues, and live interaction with Kubernetes systems. Specifically, the demonstration shows, with normal human language interaction, a conversational ability to query the live underlying systems via API integration with the AI, enabling the user to converse with the AI to discover, analyze, and repair complex problems in a highly distributed system, such as a 5G Open RAN deployment.
The following capabilities will be highlighted in the demo:
- Discovery of failed cloud-native Pods and AI-suggested commands for repair
- Discovery of network assets with natural language interactions
- Discovery of system alarms and AI-suggested methods of repair
- Auditing for security issues, including expired Kubernetes security certificates in deployed systems
These complex problems, which will be demonstrated live and within seconds, would have taken hours to more than days to discover and resolve via conventional automation systems. The interactions required the operator to write zero code or scripting, representing a leap forward in network automation leveraging AI.
“At Encora, we’re witnessing generative AI’s potential to not only transform specific use cases but to completely reshape industry value chains. Our work with Wind River, where we collaboratively developed a natural language interface for managing complex 5G networks, exemplifies this,” said Rodrigo Vargas, global vice president of AI & LLM Engineering, Encora. “Imagine entire ecosystems powered by AI, anticipating failures, streamlining operations, and optimizing networks in real time. This is the future that generative AI promises, and Encora’s gen AI practice is at the forefront, pioneering concepts for tasks such as root-cause analysis, anomaly detection, and automated compliance. We’re empowering businesses across verticals to harness this potential and unlock a future of innovation at an unprecedented pace.”
Wind River has also played key roles in the world’s first successful 5G data session; first Open RAN deployment in Canada; in building commercial vRAN/O-RAN programs, including one of the largest Open RAN networks in the world; and launching the first fully automated edge data center for commercial service.
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