Telco-oRAG: Optimizing Retrieval-augmented Generation for Telecom Queries via Hybrid Retrieval and Neural Routing

Abstract: Artificial intelligence will be one of the key pillars of the next generation of mobile networks (6G), as it is expected to provide novel added-value services and improve network performance. In this context, LLMs have the potential to revolutionize the telecom landscape through intent comprehension, intelligent knowledge retrieval, coding proficiency, and cross-domain orchestration capabilities. This paper presents Telco-oRAG, an open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework optimized for answering technical questions in the telecommunications domain, with a particular focus on 3GPP standards. Telco-oRAG introduces a hybrid retrieval strategy that combines 3GPP domain-specific retrieval with web search, supported by glossary-enhanced query refinement and a neural router for memory-efficient retrieval. Our results show that Telco-oRAG improves the accuracy in answering 3GPP-related questions by up to 17.6% and achieves a 10.6% improvement in lexicon queries compared to baselines. Furthermore, Telco-oRAG reduces memory usage by 45% through targeted retrieval of relevant 3GPP series compared to baseline RAG, and enables open-source LLMs to reach GPT-4-level accuracy on telecom benchmarks.