Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Mavenir, Radisys, and Wind River are all on board as the semiconductor geniuses at Nvidia are collaborating with these notable 5G entities to create solutions for Nvidia’s AI-on-5G platform. The goal is to speed up the efforts being put forth so that solutions may be developed quickly for a variety of uses.
Nvidia’s AI-on-5G platform uses the company’s Aerial software development kit and a coverage card known as the BlueField-2 A100, capable of combining graphic and data processing units such as Nvidia’s “5T for 5G” solution. It is capable of operating 5G and edge AI computing for high-performance applications involving 5G RAN and AI. The platform handles all of these things while shortening the time for development and delivering AI applications to entities with great speed.
One of the most interesting aspects of this announcement is that while all of these companies have their hands in the realm of 5G, none of them are carriers. The solutions being developed, however, are aimed at helping mobile network operators. An example of this is Fujitsu leveraging Nvidia’s AI-on-5G platform so that Open RAN solutions can be developed for operators as seen with how Fujitsu and Nvidia are helping NTT DOCOMO become Open RAN in 5G.
Nvidia’s Senior VP of Telecom, Ronnie Vasishta spoke on this progress saying, “Today, MNOs are already using Nvidia EdgeAI solutions to provide smart cities, cloudXR, cloud gaming, and other services. The next step for operators is virtualized 5G connectivity, and they’re evaluating Nvidia GPUs and DPUs for 5G RAN and core to implement a converged AI-on-5G platform. In terms of names that we’re working with on AI applications, we’ve publicly announced NTT East, NTT DOCOMO, Vodafone, and British Telecom.”
AI is a huge component of many technologies and 5G is no exception. We are seeing that AI in 5G networks can help network providers monitor their networks and fix problems much easier than in the past. Because of the lower cost of maintaining networks, there is a lot of evidence pointing to better coverage in rural and underserved markets through 5G and fixed wireless connections. Some of the exciting techniques being used by providers such as DISH Wireless and its desire to utilize network slicing will benefit from AI in 5G such as Nvidia’s AI-on-5G platform.
“All the carriers will be using AI with 5G. AI will help them model their networks to look for anomalies, help them service and sell to customers and also with optimizing network slicing. Nvidia is making it easier for them to do all of that,” said Jack Gold, the Founder and Principal Analyst for J. Gold & Associates.
Many other promising efforts are already underway with Nvidia’s other partnerships. Two 5G vRAN systems based on Aerial SDK are coming from Mavenir to provide enterprises and 5G network operators private 5G network solutions. Radisys and Wind River are also working on Aerial AI-on-5G solutions for commercial use, while Google Cloud is looking to extend the application management platform of Google’s Anthos to the network edge. This will help customers deploy commercial, containerized applications quicker.
Source: Fierce Wireless