Ericsson expands its 5G Platform, demos AI-driven network management

Ericsson has expanded its 5G Platform with additions across core, radio access, transport and service orchestration areas to help mobile network operators (MNOs) evolve their networks and deploy 5G at scale. The company also demonstrated the use of machine learning driven automation to improve and simplify network management at a briefing event that took place earlier this week.

The company has added seven new products to its Cloud Core portfolio and these support both 5G Standalone and Non-standalone, along with earlier generations of cellular technology. Ericsson’s Dual-mode 5G Cloud Core solution is cloud native for automated capacity management and the company claims that it delivers also delivers a high-performance user plane to cope with 5G use case needs and includes open APIs for innovation on 5G capabilities like network slicing and edge computing.

In a similar vein, Ericsson’s updated dynamic orchestration solution introduces network slicing automation, comprising the creation, testing, and development of network slices for the fast introduction of 5G services. It also includes AI-driven closed-loop automation for hybrid networks in a multi-vendor environment to allow issues that can potentially impact service delivery to be identified and for the network to be adapted in real-time to ensure that these do not affect the end-user experience. Ericsson-acquired company CENX’s service assurance system will also be used to allow operators to easily visualise the state of their networks in real-time. Ericsson claims that this overall approach can reduce the time need to deploy new software by 30 per cent, reduce the time to market for new services by 70 per cent and reduce operational expenditure by around 30 per cent (with the bulk of the latter coming from AI driven closed-loop automation).