Ericsson Canada partners with Montreal universities to reduce 5G energy usage

STOCKHOLM – Today, Ericsson Canada (NASDAQ: ERIC) announced a strategic research program led by École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), in partnership with Concordia University, Polytechnique Montréal and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), to explore how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help the telecommunications sector minimize the energy consumption of 5G networks. The project aims to help communication service providers shrink their carbon footprint and reduce operational costs by saving on energy, which will, in turn, help lower costs for consumers and decrease harmful emissions.

Data scientists from Ericsson's Global Artificial Intelligence Accelerator (GAIA) in Montreal will support the three-year research project in close collaboration with 7 professors and 27 researchers from ÉTS, Concordia and Polytechnique and expertise from Environment and Climate Change Canada. Ericsson will bring its global expertise in this area from Ericsson Research to steer the group in standardizing their research findings and drive towards industrialized solutions that can be integrated into its 5G products and services. The outcomes of this research are also expected to strengthen ECCC's Greenhouse Gas (GHG) modeling solutions for the information and communication technologies sector and contribute to global standardization. This partnership is supported by contributions from the Quebec government (through InnovÉÉ - Innovation en Énergie Électrique) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

The information and communication technologies (ICT) industry is an energy intensive and growing sector. 5G is more energy efficient than previous generations of mobile communications, however, the energy consumption of entire mobile networks is expected to increase due to the need to expand network capacity to meet the exponential growth in data traffic. By embedding AI into those networks, researchers will devise ways for them to self-configure and reconfigure to push energy consumption to a minimum while maintaining the required quality of service.

Read the full press release here.

Ericsson