Technology
Northeastern University, SoftBank Corp., Keysight, and zTouch Networks Demonstrate LTM-powered Autonomous Agentic AI-RAN at MWC Barcelona 2026
Northeastern University's Institute for Intelligent Networked Systems (INSI), SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank), Keysight Technologies, and zTouch Networks are demonstrating Autonomous Agentic AI-RAN (AgentRAN) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2026. AgentRAN is a first-of-its-kind system that coordinates a hierarchy of AI agents to translate high-level operator intents into real-time, autonomous 5G and 6G network configurations and services.
About this update from Keysight Technologies Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"Long-standing industry-academic collaboration delivers first-of-its-kind intent-driven, AI-native RAN powered by a Large Telecom Model","length":134,"tagName":"p"},{"type":"text","content":"BOSTON and BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Northeastern University's Institute for Intelligent Networked Systems (INSI), SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank), Keysight Technologies, and zTouch Networks are demonstrating Autonomous Agentic AI-RAN (AgentRAN) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2026. AgentRAN is a first-of-its-kind system that coordinates a hierarchy of AI agents to translate high-level operator intents into real-time, autonomous 5G and 6G network configurations and services.","length":508,"tagName":"p"},{"type":"text","content":"The demonstration is the latest milestone in a collaboration anchored at Northeastern University, where INSI has served as a nexus for industry-academic partnerships at the frontier of intelligent wireless networks. Over the past few years, Northeastern has built deep research ties with SoftBank on AI-native architectures, leading to multiple publications, AI-RAN Alliance demonstrations, and innovation in next-generation wireless. INSI collaborates with Keysight on AI-RAN testing and spun off zTouch Networks to commercialize technology on open, GPU-accelerated RAN infrastructure. This demo brings those threads together for the first time around a shared vision: truly autonomous, AI-driven radio access networks.","length":720,"tagName":"p"},{"type":"text","content":"How It Works","length":12,"tagName":"p"},{"type":"text","content":"At the heart of the demo is AgentRAN, developed at Northeastern's Open6G AI-RAN Alliance Lab. Operators express goals in natural language – such as "maximize throughput while prioritizing emergency traffic" – and the AgentRAN Manager decomposes these intents into actions for specialized agents operating across the RAN stack. The agents are powered by the SoftBank's Large Telecom Model (LTM), a purpose-built foundation model trained on telecom-specific KPIs, configurations, and domain data—further optimized with high-fidelity training data generated using Keysight's RF digital twin channel emulation solutions with real world accurate 3D ray tracing capabilities (RaySIM, PROPSIM) for more accurate decisions than generic cloud models can delive...