ZTE AIR Core Unleashes a New Era of Agent Services Beyond Connectivity

ZTE Corporation has introduced its innovative AIR Core at MWC Shanghai 2026, signaling a strategic pivot towards an AI-native network architecture. This development aims to move beyond conventional 'connectivity pipes' to deliver 'intent-driven intelligent services,' fundamentally reshaping how networks interact with AI. The AIR Core is engineered to support a new era of AI agents, facilitating advanced communication paradigms, particularly in the context of 6G networks. A central component of this advancement is the integration of multimodal AI capabilities. The AIR Core enables services like AI Assistant Calling, where users can engage with personalized assistants that understand and process information through native multimodal interactions. This allows for complex tasks to be completed efficiently within calls, augmented by an AI-powered noise-cancellation micro-model that ensures superior audio clarity. The underlying architecture, known as the Agent Service Network (ASN), is designed to extend service targets beyond human users to encompass various AI entities, including home robots, digital humans, and virtual assistants. This network provides efficient connectivity, trusted identity management, and integrated computing-network-intelligence empowerment for these AI agents. Furthermore, the AIR Core incorporates an AI User Plane Function (AI-UPF) that is crucial for managing new AI traffic patterns, which are often multimodal, bursty, and real-time. The AI-UPF utilizes large models for precise AI traffic identification and experience measurement, establishing dedicated AI PDU sessions with differentiated Quality of Service (QoS). This device-network collaboration optimizes computing power within the network, enabling intelligent scheduling, precise token metering, and low-latency computing offloading for edge AI applications. ZTE's vision for the AIR Core is to break the boundaries of legacy networks, achieving three-dimensional upgrades in service scope, space, and content, thereby laying a robust foundation for agentic communication in 5G-Advanced and future 6G networks.