Initiatives toward Intelligent RAN
Taichi Katsuragawa, Akihiro Kawana, Yoshio INOUE, Takahiro Tateishi, Eina Hashimoto, Takumi Fujitsuka · NTT technical review · 2022
The network of the fifth-generation mobile-communications-system era must be able to support many and varied applications, which means ever increasing complexity.It will therefore not be easy to control and optimize network operations by manual means as done in the past.NTT DOCOMO is developing radio access network (RAN) Intelligent Controller (RIC) technology now being standardized at the O-RAN ALLIANCE with the aim of achieving more autonomous and automatic RAN operations, that is, intelligent RAN, by using machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence, big data, etc.This article describes the state of RIC standardization at the O-RAN ALLIANCE and presents NTT DOCOMO's approach to use cases and a roadmap toward intelligent RAN.