Papers for

cell network operators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

AI-RAN systems share GPU power to speed up foundation model training

Weaver: A System for AI-RAN Compute Sharing with Foundation Model Training

Abstract: The emergence of AI-RAN infrastructure, which equips cell sites with GPU-accelerated hardware, creates an opportunity to colocate non-RAN workloads with primary RAN processing. We explore using this spare capacity for decentralized training of foundation models (FMs), one of the most compute-intensive AI workloads. We present the first characterization of spare GPU capacity in AI-RAN systems at both micro-scale--across transmission slots within a cell site--and macro-scale--across sites. Our analysis finds that 40-85% of GPU capacity is unused; although this capacity is temporally bursty at individual sites, it is spatially complementary across sites. To safely and efficiently harness these resources, we present Weaver, a system that opportunistically trains FMs alongside latency-critical RAN workloads without degrading RAN performance. Weaver adopts a RAN-first design: a spare-compute controller integrated into the MAC scheduler uses compute-aware scheduling to smooth RAN GPU demand and exposes more usable spare GPU capacity. A two-level elastic training framework then adapts to dynamic, heterogeneous spare capacity within and across sites. Experiments on an O-RAN-aligned system prototype show that Weaver creates up to 4.9x more usable spare compute and utilizes up to 83% of the available spare capacity. On a multi-site testbed, Weaver improves training throughput by 2.1-3.7x over baseline approaches.

Mon 28 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Cell sites with special GPUs often have unused computing power. The authors studied how this extra power can be safely used to train big AI models without slowing down the main cell tasks. They designed a system called Weaver that manages GPU use cleverly to fit AI training around cell operations. Weaver lets multiple cell sites share their spare power, increasing how much AI work gets done. Tests showed this method greatly improved training speed without hurting cell service.
Open → 2609.35276v1