Intelligent RAN Automation for 5G and Beyond.

5G is becoming more agile and inevitably more complicated for supporting various deployment scenarios and diversified applications. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming one of the most essential driving forces for 5G evolution to handle the complexity and further improve the network spectrum efficiency, energy efficiency and user experience. In this article, we share the latest standardization progress of the industry on AI in 5G. Evolving directions for the intelligent radio access networks (RAN) are analyzed and further enhancements on both AI for RAN and RAN for AI are proposed based on a hierarchical and distributed intelligent RAN architecture. Case studies are presented along with field trial results. An innovative AI-empowered RAN and service-aware cross layer optimization framework is illustrated for the quality of experience (QoE) optimization of cloud virtual reality (VR) with converged communication and computing services provided by RAN. The extension of the solution to support the AI/ML services is also discussed to shed some light on how to evolve network for AI toward the 6G vision.