Nokia has mounted a successful field trial of its Cloud RAN architecture on the China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC) live 5G NSA network in Shanghai.
Using the Nokia 5G commercial-ready AirScale base station, Nokia and China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI) successfully trialled a VR gaming application based on an AI-powered cloud RAN edge computing platform. This is claimed to be the first successful test of the AI-enabled edge cloud for ensuring an extreme 5G user experience, and prove the commercial readiness of the Nokia Cloud RAN split CU/DU architecture for 5G networks.
As a founding member of the O-RAN alliance, CMCC's research arm, CMRI, has been instrumental in setting industry norms and benchmarks for 5G performances. Nokia is the first vendor to join the alliance and has been working closely with CMRI on the design of it 5G field trials.
At the recent tests, Nokia and CMCC successfully completed the cloud RAN field trials with its open RAN CU/DU split architecture. Using the Nokia AirScale base station, the companies also successfully tested the AI machine learning related functions over O-RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) architecture, including the Nokia AI deep learning inference functionality and communication interface for AI model deployment and management. The Nokia ML algorithms were successful at responding to test-induced network contention issues with automatic, accurate and near-real-time response to deliver QoE for live VR gamers.
