SoftBank announced its partnership with NVIDIA to open a research facility called AI-on-5G Lab to demo various solutions including AI technology.
The facility, which will feature fully virtualized wireless networks for 5G, will be located in SoftBank’s headquarters in Japan in 2022. SoftBank will develop end-to-end solutions for private 5G to accelerate the commercialization of fully virtualized private 5G.
The AI-on-5G Lab will enable a variety of experiments that integrate both vRAN and MEC functions with GPUs.
The AI-on-5G Lab consists of hardware and middleware for base station virtualization and AI processing both provided by NVIDIA, virtualized wireless signal processing software and core network software provided by Mavenir, a network software provider, and physical antennas provided by Foxconn Technology on top of private 5G networks provided by SoftBank.
