Northeastern College’s Institute for Clever Networked Programs (INSI), SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank), Keysight Applied sciences, and zTouch Networks are demonstrating Autonomous Agentic AI-RAN (AgentRAN) at Cell World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2026. AgentRAN is a first-of-its-kind system that coordinates a hierarchy of AI brokers to translate high-level operator intents into real-time, autonomous 5G and 6G community configurations and providers.
The demonstration is the newest milestone in a collaboration anchored at Northeastern College, the place INSI has served as a nexus for industry-academic partnerships on the frontier of clever wi-fi networks. Over the previous few years, Northeastern has constructed deep analysis ties with SoftBank on AI-native architectures, resulting in a number of publications, AI-RAN Alliance demonstrations, and innovation in next-generation wi-fi. INSI collaborates with Keysight on AI-RAN testing and spun off zTouch Networks to commercialize know-how on open, GPU-accelerated RAN infrastructure. This demo brings these threads collectively for the primary time round a shared imaginative and prescient: actually autonomous, AI-driven radio entry networks.
The way it works
On the coronary heart of the demo is AgentRAN, developed at Northeastern’s Open6G AI-RAN Alliance Lab. Operators specific targets in pure language – akin to “maximize throughput whereas prioritizing emergency visitors” – and the AgentRAN Supervisor decomposes these intents into actions for specialised brokers working throughout the RAN stack. The brokers are powered by the SoftBank’s Giant Telecom Mannequin (LTM), a purpose-built basis mannequin educated on telecom-specific KPIs, configurations, and area knowledge—additional optimized with high-fidelity coaching knowledge generated utilizing Keysight’s RF digital twin channel emulation options with actual world correct 3D ray tracing capabilities (RaySIM, PROPSIM) for extra correct selections than generic cloud fashions can ship.
The Northeastern Open6G AI-RAN lab, utilizing Keysight’s PROPSIM, demonstrates a number of agentic eventualities, deployed on an end-to-end programmable non-public 5G AI-RAN infrastructure, managed and orchestrated by zTouch Networks’ zTouch.OS. The demonstration exhibits the system’s capacity to detect altering circumstances and adapt autonomously. Utilizing Keysight’s AI-RAN efficiency scoring answer, the system exhibits clear efficiency good points linked to the usage of SoftBank’s LTM, excessive constancy coaching datasets generated by Keysight RF digital twin options, and zTouch Networks’ zTouch.OS.
Learn the complete press launch right here.