The how and why of AI: enabling the intelligent network

It's easy to throw in a buzz word like AI these days to get some attention. My aim is to offer some valuable insights into how AI can make a real difference in the world of radio access networks (RANs), looking at the way it works as well as the multiple benefits it brings. From a technology perspective, AI in the RAN is about letting the hardware adjust its decision-making capability and allowing it to learn from patterns. Learning can improve the baseband functionality, which otherwise acts based on hard-coded settings. Of course, the pattern observations and execution of AI and machine learning (ML) require a certain amount of computing capacity.