Making tailored customer experiences a reality with 5G, AI and orchestration
There is still a significant gap between the full potential of 5G and accessibility for customers with highly diverse use cases and requirements. Together with a partner ecosystem including Nokia, Telenor Research & Innovation in Norway aims to bridge this gap by abstracting underlying technical complexities through AI and automation to offer private 5G solutions that best address specific customer needs.
Leveraging an experimental 5G platform to strengthen 5G uptake and monetization
Telenor worked with its partners to create iCORA, an innovative, cloud-native, open, resilient and automated experimental platform for end-to-end 5G services. This large-scale platform is now running live in the Telenor lab environment in Oslo. Most recently, it was used for a project that demonstrates how the ordering of private or dedicated/sliced 5G network capabilities can be simplified with a GenAI-enabled customer portal and end-to-end service orchestration capabilities.
For this project, Nokia Orchestration Center manages the end-to-end 5G service orchestration across the solutions from the various partners. In addition, the process to gather requirements has been simplified. In the customer portal, an LLM-powered chatbot assistant captures the customer requirements (i.e., the intent) in natural language and translates them into an intent-based order towards the Orchestration Center using the TMF921 Intent Management API. Orchestration Center then leverages an LLM to translate the intent order to a technical order, specifying the technical parameters to create the required 5G network for a specific use-case.
Shown from left to right in the diagram below, the following use cases were implemented as part of the project:
- Autonomous 5G for an island community: At Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, a private 5G network was deployed with two 5G cores for high resilience: the main core on the cloud and an on-premises failover core.
- Support of edge intelligence and drone cells: A portable 5G network with extendable coverage through a tethered drone offered support for AI-driven object detection at a disaster site.
- Mission-critical applications: A mobile 5G network on wheels was driven to an emergency site, enabling mission-critical services for first responders.
- Network exposure for forestry applications: With real-time monitoring, a mission-critical application can be given priority on demand over a surveillance application in an emergency.
- Industry 4.0 robotics: A local breakout edge ensured low latency for a robotic arm, with RedCap monitoring.
Source: Telenor
Customer intent and requirements are extracted from the AI conversation, such as “mission-critical 5G” for an emergency network or “exposable 5G” for advanced capabilities such as quality-on-demand (QoD). Once the intent is confirmed with an order, the required API calls are automatically sent to the relevant 5G systems for service activation, including equipment reservation for portable solutions. For slice-based deployments, Orchestration Center triggers the relevant workflows for automated deployment of tailored slice configurations, user provisioning and service activation.
Orchestration Center operates on any cloud and across all network domains. When combined with assurance, it supports closed-loop automation and other capabilities required to achieve autonomous operations – the ultimate objective for Telenor and many communication service providers around the world. For this project, the implementation is mainly focused on orchestrating and provisioning the core domain including edge sites in a fully cloud-native environment based on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. The slice-based private 5G network is delivered by network functions provided by various vendors, all triggered by the same order initiated through the customer portal. The orchestration of the edge site at the University of Oslo covers the user plane function (UPF) and other third-party applications.
In addition, the project leverages Nokia Cloud Operations Manager which automates the lifecycle of network services including VNFs, CNFs, and virtualized network resources.
Source: Telenor
The diagram above shows how Orchestration Center and Cloud Operations Manager create the required slices in a full multi-vendor environment. For network service slice deployment, Orchestration Center pulls the relevant information from the repository before triggering Cloud Operations Manager for CNF lifecycle management and the underlying EMSs for configuration and provisioning tasks.
Use case examples
As outlined above, this project is not just theoretical, it’s being evaluated in real-world scenarios and is demonstrating significant benefits.
In cooperation with the University of Oslo, an Industry 4.0 use case demonstrated how customers requiring low latency used an automatically created network slice instance to a local breakout edge. Nokia small cells radio and a local breakout edge provided low latency connectivity to assure flawless control of a robotics arm.
For another use case, a network slice was created to support two concurrent applications. The first one used Nokia’s Real-time Extended Reality Multimedia (RXRM) solution which guarantees video quality even in situations with bandwidth constraints. The second application provided mission critical communication, specifically high-priority video conferencing for emergency health diagnostics. In case the mission-critical application experience was jeopardized, Nokia’s Network as Code QoD API was used to downgrade the RXRM app via the network exposure function (NEF), thereby ensuring an adequate experience for users of both applications.
QoD enables vertical applications to directly interact with the network to dynamically change bit rates allocated to a device via the NEF, or the 3GPP-based NEF API is abstracted by Network as Code into high-level CAMARA-based APIs for a more simplified experience for the application developer as shown in the diagram below.
Features such as QoD, real-time support, mission-critical services, edge intelligence, tethered drone cells and on-premises failovers can be offered based on the customer intent to enhance the end-user experiences for different use cases.
What’s next?
The innovation activities on the Telenor iCORA innovation platform will continue in 2025 with testing of new verticals in the context of the IMAGINE-B5G European Commission program and other activities. This includes ordering of “Edge-as-a-Platform” capabilities, orchestration and assurance closed-loop automation, widening the scope to include additional network domains and the introduction of programmable network capabilities to drive monetization.
With this project, Telenor, Nokia and the broad partner ecosystem involved are enabling enterprises and public institutions to leverage the full potential of 5G by hiding the technical complexity with AI and automation. By breaking down technology barriers, the platform enables accelerated innovation for any type of 5G service.
