PARTNER CONTENT: Shifting from legacy "connectivity pipes" to intent-driven intelligent services, the 6G-ready architecture introduces an Agent Service Network designed for the era of AI and human collaboration
ZTE showcased at MWC Shanghai 2026 its AIR Core, designed for the era of AI agents. Building on deep expertise in core networks and AI, AIR Core drives a paradigm shift from traditional "connectivity pipes" to "intent-driven intelligent services". By integrating AI, computing, data, and security capabilities, it constructs an Agent Service Network (ASN) that spans across devices and ecosystems, comprehensively empowering diverse demands from individuals, smart homes, connected vehicles, and massive emerging AI agents.
Powered by AIR Core, key services are elevated across three dimensions:
Voice – AI New Calling: From "Basic Calling" to "Smart Services"
Introducing the AI Assistant Calling, users can summon personalized assistants on demand. With native multimodal interactions, complex tasks can be seamlessly closed-looped during calls. Furthermore, an AI-powered noise-cancellation micro-model eliminates 99.9% of ambient noise, ensuring pristine call clarity.
Bytes – Experience Monetization: From "Extensive" to "Precision"
By integrating NWDAF and AI-UPF, the network achieves precise service identification, real-time QoE assessment, and sub-second dynamic policy adjustments, making premium experiences perceptible and quantifiable. For high-value scenarios like high-speed railways, NWDAF leverages spatiotemporal large models to build real-time user profiles and deliver dedicated network guarantees, truly achieving personalized experiences at scale.
Token – New Business Model: From "Selling Connectivity" to "Selling AI Services"
To accommodate new AI traffic patterns (multimodal, bursty real-time, and symmetric uplink/downlink), the AI-UPF integrates large models for precise AI traffic identification and experience measurement. It establishes dedicated AI PDU sessions with differentiated QoS. Device-network collaboration drives computing power into the network and enables intelligent scheduling, supporting precise token metering and empowering low-latency computing offloading and real-time responses for edge AI applications.
AIR Core fundamentally breaks the boundaries of legacy networks, achieving three-dimensional upgrades in service scope, space, and content:
Service Scope: From "Humans" to "All AI agents"
Through ASN, service targets expand beyond humans and machines to include AI entities like home robots, digital humans, and virtual assistants. This provides efficient connectivity, trusted identity management, and integrated computing-network-intelligence empowerment for agentic communication.
Service Space: From "Terrestrial" to "Space-Air-Ground Integration"
With deep integration of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), intelligent routing based on dynamic topology perception coordinates multi-orbit satellites and terrestrial networks. This provides highly reliable, ubiquitous connectivity for remote areas, maritime, aviation, and emergency scenarios.
Service Content: From "Single Traffic" to a "Traffic + Token + Data" Trinity
The AI-UPF evolves into a converged computing-network-intelligence gateway, ensuring precise AI service identification and on-demand resource scheduling. It also builds a Unified Data Plane (RTDS) for centralized data collection, storage, and analysis, supporting user profiling, experience monetization, and data value realization.
Marking a fundamental architectural leap from Cloud Native to AI Native, AIR Core lays the foundation for agentic communication in 5G-Advanced and 6G networks. Currently in pilot and early commercial deployment, ZTE AIR Core is partnering with global operators to accelerate their transformation from "connectivity providers" to "intelligent service enablers", jointly exploring new monetization pathways for the agentic era.
Contributed by ZTE.