Telecom Foundation Models: Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends

Telecom networks are becoming increasingly complex, with diversified deployment scenarios, multi-standards, and multi-vendor support. The intricate nature of the telecom network ecosystem presents challenges to effectively manage, operate, and optimize networks. To address these hurdles, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely adopted to solve different tasks in telecom networks. However, these conventional AI models are often designed for specific tasks, rely on extensive and costly-to-collect labeled data that require specialized telecom expertise for development and maintenance. The AI models usually fail to generalize and support diverse deployment scenarios and applications. In contrast, Foundation Models (FMs) show effective generalization capabilities in various domains in language, vision, and decision-making tasks. FMs can be trained on multiple data modalities generated from the telecom ecosystem and leverage specialized domain knowledge. Moreover, FMs can be fine-tuned to solve numerous specialized tasks with minimal task-specific labeled data and, in some instances, are able to leverage context to solve previously unseen problems. At the dawn of 6G, this paper investigates the potential opportunities of using FMs to shape the future of telecom technologies and standards. In particular, the paper outlines a conceptual process for developing Telecom FMs (TFMs) and discusses emerging opportunities for orchestrating specialized TFMs for network configuration, operation, and maintenance. Finally, the paper discusses the limitations and challenges of developing and deploying TFMs.

Mobile Network Configuration Recommendation using Deep Generative Graph Neural Network

There are vast number of configurable parameters in a Radio Access Telecom Network. A significant amount of these parameters is configured by Radio Node or cell based on their deployment setting. Traditional methods rely on domain knowledge for individual parameter configuration, often leading to sub-optimal results. To improve this, a framework using a Deep Generative Graph Neural Network (GNN) is proposed. It encodes the network into a graph, extracts subgraphs for each RAN node, and employs a Siamese GNN (S-GNN) to learn embeddings. The framework recommends configuration parameters for a multitude of parameters and detects misconfigurations, handling both network expansion and existing cell reconfiguration. Tested on real-world data, the model surpasses baselines, demonstrating accuracy, generalizability, and robustness against concept drift.

Context-Aware Mobile Network Performance Prediction Using Network & Remote Sensing Data

Accurate estimation of Network Performance is crucial for several tasks in telecom networks. Telecom networks regularly serve a vast number of radio nodes. Each radio node provides services to end-users in the associated coverage areas. The task of predicting Network Performance for telecom networks necessitates considering complex spatio-temporal interactions and incorporating geospatial information where the radio nodes are deployed. Instead of relying on historical data alone, our approach augments network historical performance datasets with satellite imagery data. Our comprehensive experiments, using real-world data collected from multiple different regions of an operational network, show that the model is robust and can generalize across different scenarios. The results indicate that the model, utilizing satellite imagery, performs very well across the tested regions. Additionally, the model demonstrates a robust approach to the cold-start problem, offering a promising alternative for initial performance estimation in newly deployed sites.

Test Code Generation for Telecom Software Systems using Two-Stage Generative Model

In recent years, the evolution of Telecom towards achieving intelligent, autonomous, and open networks has led to an increasingly complex Telecom Software system, supporting various heterogeneous deployment scenarios, with multi-standard and multi-vendor support. As a result, it becomes a challenge for large-scale Telecom software companies to develop and test software for all deployment scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a framework for Automated Test Generation for large-scale Telecom Software systems. We begin by generating Test Case Input data for test scenarios observed using a time-series Generative model trained on historical Telecom Network data during field trials. Additionally, the time-series Generative model helps in preserving the privacy of Telecom data. The generated time-series software performance data are then utilized with test descriptions written in natural language to generate Test Script using the Generative Large Language Model. Our comprehensive experiments on public datasets and Telecom datasets obtained from operational Telecom Networks demonstrate that the framework can effectively generate comprehensive test case data input and useful test code.

Fault Detection in Mobile Networks Using Diffusion Models

In today's hyper-connected world, ensuring the reliability of telecom networks becomes increasingly crucial. Telecom networks encompass numerous underlying and intertwined software and hardware components, each providing different functionalities. To ensure the stability of telecom networks, telecom software, and hardware vendors developed several methods to detect any aberrant behavior in telecom networks and enable instant feedback and alerts. These approaches, although powerful, struggle to generalize due to the unsteady nature of the software-intensive embedded system and the complexity and diversity of multi-standard mobile networks. In this paper, we present a system to detect anomalies in telecom networks using a generative AI model. We evaluate several strategies using diffusion models to train the model for anomaly detection using multivariate time-series data. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (i) A proposal of a framework for utilizing diffusion models for time-series anomaly detection in telecom networks, (ii) A proposal of a particular Diffusion model architecture that outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques, (iii) Experiments on a real-world dataset to demonstrate that our model effectively provides explainable results, exposing some of its limitations and suggesting future research avenues to enhance its capabilities further.