Lenovo

This is a contract based opportunity, where you will contribute on behalf of Lenovo and will be employed externally by a partner of ours.

Preferred start: 1st January 2024

Contract duration: 30-36 months

Description of role:

This position relates to participating in an EU SNS project which will bring service-based architecture (SBA) design to RAN (end-to-end 6G network design) and develop key network technologies related to AI/ML, network digital twins, and uniform resource management framework to enable an energy efficient and intelligent system architecture to support extreme 6G use cases in a fully cloudified, distributed communication and computing.

As part of the project Lenovo aims to contribute to the new architecture by:

• Exploring the notion of RAN-CN convergence and enhanced SBA for emerging 6G architecture.
• Introducing 5G core micro network functions that combine RAN and 5G core services.
• Exploring the adoption of Native AI by design in future radio and network protocols.
• Exploring exposure enhancements for supporting new architecture cross-domain SBA.

To be successful in this role, you will be expected to work on providing support on this project, and in particular to:

• Analyze the architecture implications and identify use cases, as well as network impacts and limitations towards the new SBA architecture.
• Provide solutions for ensuring optimized end to end performance, based on the identified use cases (e.g., per vertical segment).
• Investigate the impact on signaling and complexity based on different deployments and placement of converged RAN-CN functionalities.
• Investigate the notion of native AI and provide solutions for embedding and controlling intelligence on converged RAN-CN micro network functions.
• Produce analytical and simulation results for the proposed solutions and support the implementation of new solutions in EU project testbeds.
• Disseminate outputs in high quality publications (journals, conferences) and to standardization activities (3GPP, O-RAN).

Tasks:

Your tasks include to:

• Participate in the project’s daily tasks (quarterly physical meetings, virtual meetings).
• Design (in collaboration with Lenovo experts) an enhanced end to end SBA with native intelligence and provide solutions for enabling such new architecture, and optionally support for digital twin-based optimizations. In this task, mathematical analysis and simulations will be needed, for evaluating the performance of the proposed solutions and compare them with benchmarks in terms of signaling/complexity. Solutions can relate to the optimal configuration and placement of micro network functions and AI native functionality in core, RAN as well as application layer, given vertical use cases.
• Support the design of the AI-driven functions and their utilization for service control and orchestration. This task involves the enhancement of network and UE functions with AI capabilities and showcase one scenario for QoE optimization. In this task, mathematical analysis and system level simulations will be needed to define and analyze the optimization problem for optimally configuring the network functionalities with AI capability, and evaluate the performance and compare with existing solutions.  
• Support  3GPP/O-RAN standardization activities related to the project’s work dissemination.