In The Arena by TechArena - Architecting the Future of the Network with Samsung’s Yue Wang

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Samsung’s Head of 6G Advanced Network Research and one of the industry’s top women in 6G, Yue Wang, about her vision for the next generation communications standard, what technical forces are shaping its progress, and how the industry stands to capitalize on its fruition.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein, and I'm so delighted to have Yue Wang, Head of Advanced Network Research at Samsung with me. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much. We were supposed to interview last year, and we missed the interview because I was ill. So I'm so glad to have you on the show this year. Why don't you just start with an introduction of your role at Samsung and Samsung's very well-known role in the industry? Yeah, sure. I'm the head of the Advanced Network Research Group at Samsung R&D UK.

So Samsung R&D Institute in the UK is one of the Samsung Overseas Research Labs. And in this show, I lead a team of researchers, really talented researchers, working on the cutting-edge technologies and the initiatives on Vora and Beyond 5G and 6G networks. We engage both in near-term research topics and with the potential impact to the product and business divisions, as well as long-term research such as these into the 6G technologies from physical layer to the network architecture, AI. So yeah, that's what I did. All right.

So 2023 was a year of moving the full potential of 5G forward and deployments and massive acceleration of AI across the entire computing landscape. You're working at the crossroads of AI and next-generation 6G technology. How do you see that confluence moving forward? Yeah, it's a very good question. I think we're going to see a lot more innovations that are going to happen at the intersection between 6G and AI. I mean, we have already seen many good AI examples and solutions applied to the network operations, service operations,

for example, to reduce network cost, to enhance network operational efficiency, improve customer service. I think we are going to see more and more AI integrations like these into the network and to provide benefits to the network. But I think at the moment, a lot of the AI solutions in the network is actually developed from a use case by use case perspective. So for example, you may have an AI for under receiving, another AI for traffic steering. At the moment, these AI models are developed individually, and they don't know the existence of the other AI models, especially if it's provided by another vendor. So even if one AI is designed perfectly,

it may not work well with the other AI models for that. So although we are seeing a massive acceleration of the AI integration into the network, the development and the integration of these solutions at the moment is actually quite fragmented. And so moving forward, I hope we see more holistic coherence solutions to enable all the AI models to work together and also for AI and 6G to work together. So I think AI in the network

is becoming faster, AI in the network becomes more integrated. We are going to see the advanced integration under the mutual attachment between the key and AI. So it is important to realize here that the network is not just about providing connectivity, but it's going to be evolved as a platform that holds the data, intelligence, compute, and communication resources. And it's becoming a significant catalyst for the widespread adoption of AI in the wider ecosystem and to the other sectors. You know, obviously, AI is transforming every industry as we're sitting here and teleco is no different. Where do you see the impact of those fractured AI deployments today in telco?

And then how do you see that evolving into the types of network applications in the future? Yeah, sure. I think this impact of AI to telco is going to be profound. We have seen a number of examples where AI are using the telco network. Some of these developments are at the early stage.

Some are already implemented and are using the early stage, some already implemented and are using the network and are already delivering benefits. In 2023, I mean, especially after Gen AI came out, the integration of AI across the telephone network is advancing at this accelerated rate. I mean, if you go to any of the big technical conferences in the second half of 2023, you'll hear more Gen AI than quite basically. And we hear the technical experts on the stage passionately talking about embracing AI. We must embrace innovation. And we certainly see use cases in every big Gen AI. We don't want to provide these customized services.

And then you might have heard of this technical transportation to tech pool, where the tech pool companies are looking to strategically enhance their capabilities to provide this AI-enabled, wide-out added service to a wider ecosystem. And that brings a number of opportunities for innovation and new revenues for the techcom itself to the third party,

but also for someone past the third party to form the partnership with Telecom, for example, to leverage the Telecom data. So, I mean, AI is already significantly impacting the Telecom sector, and I believe we are going to see in the coming years more and more innovative services as the NTelecom converges and seamlessly integrated and business models are going to be developed. It's reshaping the dynamics among the stakeholders, opening revenues for new entrants. And so for example, services can either be developed by Telecom themselves or outsourced to the external partners. And you can expect in the coming years a dynamic ecosystem, evolving business models, changing roles of the key stakeholders,

and perhaps more related to us personally, redefining the job functions we have today. Oh, yeah, that's true. I know that your group is very involved in standards efforts. What role does industry standards play in this arena? It's a very interesting question. I mean, as we know, the industry standard

in particular, 3GPP, plays a crucial role on the technology adoption and mobility. At the moment, almost every working group in 3GPP is addressing some aspects of AI. So for example, the AI machine learning atoms in R1 and R2, in SA3 and SA5, each identify their particular

AI solutions for some domain of the network and they're defining the interfaces network functions. But we also need to bear in mind that at the end of the day, AI needs to work across the network as a whole, and that network needs to support AI across domains and end-to-end, and from operations to services and to the business, not just in one domain, not just in one 3D-to-3D working group. What is also interesting to point out here is that the standard is addressing AI incrementally based on existing network architecture developed from the 50s. I mean, at the time, AI has not been this widespread and has not been this advanced.

So they expect in general the network needs a upgrade to keep pace with the data advancement, the long talks, and to be able to resolve the potential conflict that AI needs to be resolved, facilitate the collaboration and interaction of the models. AI and data needs to be shared across the network, computational resources need to be all just created, etc. But how disruptive the upgrade needs to be remains to be seen, and it's being discussed in the center. I think the thing is, well, if the standards actually have a strict timeline and process, you know, defined by the 10-year cycle

for each generation of the network after another, yeah, it doesn't work that way. Just look how fast it took AI to fly. So developing standards to be future-proof and making sure the network evolution can keep playing with the acceleration of the emerging technologies, such as AI, is much needed. Now, you talked about how tech conferences

featured so much about Gen AI in the second half of 2023. We're here at Mobile World Congress. People are talking about 6G. They're talking about AI. They're talking about broad proliferation of 5G. What are you most eagerly anticipating in 2024 across this landscape? Firstly, I mean, we have a technical version of 5G. That would be really exciting. That would be incredible.

Where can folks engage with you and learn more about the research that you and your team are doing? I mean, the easiest is perhaps just find me on LinkedIn. I'm your required response. Thank you so much. And UA is going to be speaking at Mobile World Congress on Thursday. So if you're listening and attending the conference, please be sure to check out her session.

Thanks so much for being on the program today. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks so much for being on the program today. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by the Tech Arena.