Organizations: Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo, NY, USA
Traditional RAN systems are closed and monolithic, stifling innovation. The openness and programmability enabled by Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) are envisioned to revolutionize cellular networks with control-plane applications--xApps. The development of xApps (typically by third-party developers), however, remains time-consuming and cumbersome, often requiring months of manual coding and integration, which hinders the roll-out of new functionalities in practice. To lower the barrier of xApp development for both developers and network operators, we present AutORAN, the first LLM-driven natural language programming framework for agile xApps that automates the entire xApp development pipeline. In a nutshell, AutORAN turns high-level user intents into swiftly deployable xApps within minutes, eliminating the need for manual coding or testing. To this end, AutORAN builds a fully automated xApp generation pipeline, which integrates multiple functional modules (from user requirement elicitation, AI/ML function design and validation, to xApp synthesis and deployment). We design, implement, and comprehensively evaluate AutORAN on representative xApp tasks. Results show AutORAN-generated xApps can achieve similar or even better performance than the best known hand-crafted baselines. AutORAN drastically accelerates the xApp development cycle (from user intent elicitation to roll-out), streamlining O-RAN innovation.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Conventional xApp development hinders O-RAN innovation. AutORAN presents an automated agile xApp development framework.
Fig. 2: O-RAN architecture.
Aspects
Traditional RAN
O-RAN
Architecture
Monolithic, Integrated hardware/software
Disaggregated into modular components
Interface
Proprietary
Standardized
Vendor Ecosystem
Closed Single-vendor
Open Multi-vendor
Control Logic
Embedded in software stack
Realized through xApps
Upgrade Flexibility
Constrained by vendor-specific dependencies
High flexibility in upgrading components
Function Development
Black-box implementation
Software-defined Programmable
TABLE I: Traditional RAN v.s. O-RAN
Fig. 3: xApp Workflow.
Fig. 4: Traditional xApp Development in O-RAN v.s. Automated xApp Development.
Fig. 5: AutORAN overview.
Fig. 6: Testbedding with SDR and COTS UE.
Method
Metric
MAC
NETWORK
PDCP
RADIO
MIXED
AutORAN
Precision
97.3%
98.9%
92.1%
78.8%
97.6%
Recall
97.5%
98.9%
91.8%
81.5%
97.6%
SpotLight
Precision
93.6%
94%
100%
95%
95.5%
Recall
100%
92%
93%
93%
94.5%
Z Score
Precision
74.4%
75%
69.2%
58.8%
65.4%
Recall
82.4%
83.6%
69.4%
59.7%
79.2%
TABLE II: Accuracy comparison with SpotLight [ 9 ]
Fig. 7: Performance of AutORAN -developed anomaly detection xApp on SpotLight dataset: (a) quality improvement across iterations; and (b) xApp variants.
Fig. 8: Performance of AutORAN -developed anomaly detection xApp on MobiWatch: (a) quality increment across iterations; and (b) diverse xApp variants.
Method
Type of xApps (Dataset)
Accuracy
AutORAN
InterClass-Spec
92.9%
InterClass-KPM
98.8%
IC [ 46 ]
InterClass-Spec
98%
InterClass-KPM
97.9%
TABLE III: Accuracy comparison with IC [ 46 ]
Method
Dataset
Accuracy
Precision
Recall
AutORAN
Benign
100%
100%
N/A
Attack
100%
100%
100%
MobiWatch-1
Benign
93.23%
93.23%
N/A
Attack
100%
100%
100%
MobiWatch-2
Benign
91.15%
91.15%
N/A
Attack
95%
88.68%
100%
TABLE IV: Accuracy comparison with MobiWatch [ 10 ]
Fig. 9: Performance of AutORAN -generated slice scheduling xApp.
Fig. 10: Execution time of AutORAN -generated xApps on real-world testbed.
Fig. 11: Impact of different LLM and programming languages on AutORAN -generated xApps.
Method
One-Shot Success Rate
Iteration-to-Success Count
Baseline 1
Baseline 2
Baseline 1
Baseline 2
w/o R. (§ III-A )
0.88
0.84
8
3
w/o K. (§ III-B )
0.76
0.80
14
5
w/o F. (§ III-C )
0.90
0.80
8
3
w/o V. (§ III-C )
0.84
0.92
10
6
AutORAN
0.92
0.96
5
3
TABLE V: Ablation study ( R equirement refinement and structuring, K nowledge retrieval, F unction design, and V alidation.)
The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture allows AI to be embedded directly into the RAN through modular xApps and rApps, yet creating these applications collecting data, training models, writing code, and deploying them safely remains slow and largely manual. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning and code-generation capabilities but are unsuited for the fast, deterministic inference required in real-time RAN control. We present a proof-of-concept Dual-Brain architecture that combines both strengths: an LLM-based orchestrator translates operator intents into data-collection policies and deployment code, while an automated ML engine, NeuralSmith, trains lightweight classifiers on demand via an API. We describe the architecture and provisioning workflow, share practical insights from a containerized O-RAN 5G~SA testbed, and discuss open research directions.
Seyed Bagher Hashemi Natanzi, Pranshav Gajjar, Bo Tang +1
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609 USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695 USA
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a key enabler for autonomous radio access networks (RANs), where multiple large language model (LLM)-based agents reason and collaborate to achieve operator-defined intents. The open RAN (O-RAN) architecture enables the deployment and coordination of such agents. However, most existing works consider simple intents handled by independent agents, while complex intents that require coordination among agents remain unexplored. In this paper, we propose an agentic AI framework for intent translation and optimization in cell-free O-RAN. A supervisor agent translates the operator intents into an optimization objective and minimum rate requirements. Based on this information, a user weighting agent retrieves relevant prior experience from a memory module to determine the user priority weights for precoding. If the intent includes an energy-saving objective, then an open radio unit (O-RU) management agent will also be activated to determine the set of active O-RUs by using a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. A monitoring agent measures and monitors the user data rates and coordinates with other agents to guarantee the minimum rate requirements are satisfied. To enhance scalability, we adopt a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method that enables the same underlying LLM to be used for different agents. Simulation results show that the proposed agentic AI framework reduces the number of active O-RUs by 41.93% when compared with three baseline schemes in energy-saving mode. Using the PEFT method, the proposed framework reduces the memory usage by 92% when compared with deploying separate LLM agents.
Mohammad Hossein Shokouhi, Vincent W. S. Wong
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Cellular research and development (R&D) is throttled by six structural processes that each consume months of manual engineering work per iteration: (i) synthesizing new features from standards or research papers into production code; (ii) conformance and interoperability testing; (iii) hardening against field anomalies and diverse deployment environments; (iv) data-driven optimization of network functionalities; (v) discovering and prototyping novel waveforms, functionalities, and capabilities for future standards; and (vi) securing the stack against vulnerabilities. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have compressed comparable R&D work in general software engineering from days to minutes, their known pitfalls worsen on Radio Access Network (RAN) use cases: they hallucinate Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and mis-read specifications, which kills interoperability of RAN components at the first mistake, and they heavily rely on simulations for designing algorithms, which is notorious for breaking when transferred to real hardware. To address these challenges, we present GENESIS, an agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework that converts intents (e.g., a specification clause, a telemetry anomaly, or a research hypothesis) into solutions validated with over-the-air experiments, fed back into a persistent knowledge base. GENESIS is built on three composable primitives (agents, skills, hooks) and a knowledge layer (SYNAPSE) that doubles as the source of ground truth and the recipient of every artifact the framework produces, making capabilities compound across runs.
Tamerlan Aghayev, Maxime Elkael, Michele Polese +11
Institute for Intelligent Networked Systems at Northeastern University, Boston, MA.