Vodafone is using artificial intelligence to optimise the operation of its networks, accomplishing in hours tasks that previously took engineers months to accomplish. The achievement was announced in a blog post by Santiago Tenorio, pictured, Vodafone Group’s head of network strategy and architecture.
He said Vodafone Germany and Huawei had trialled machine learning in a centralised self-organising network (C-SON), to identify the optimal settings to deliver voice over LTE services across 450 mobile cells chosen at random.
“The algorithm completed the task in four hours. The same task would have taken an engineer around 2.5 months to do manually,” Tenorio said.
He also revealed that Vodafone Ireland and Cisco are using machine-learning algorithms in a C-SON to predict locations where 3G traffic will peak in the following hour.
“The program predicts future network traffic behaviour, based on data processing and pattern recognition,” Tenorio said. “To date, all high traffic predictions have been correct.”
Tenorio added: “We have further machine learning trials planned and expect to begin utilising the technology in our commercial networks during the 2018-19 financial year.”
