Tuesday 22 October 2019

From traditional RAN to Open RAN - O-RAN: Goals and Challenges


My Open RAN tutorial has recently gained popularity with recent announcements from Altiostar, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, Telefonica and Vodafone. With TIP Summit in few weeks time, I am hoping for a lot more curious people to discover that blog post and video.

Olivier Simon, Director, Radio Innovation, Orange spoke about "O-RAN: Goals and Challenges" at Open Networking Summit Europe 2019. In his presentation, he explained how O-RAN will trigger more intelligence and openness in the RAN domain. He talked about which use cases will require this new architecture and why O-RAN is coming at the right time. Major architectural change are necessary in the next years in order to improve E2E latency and benefit from the flexibility of virtualized network functions. O-RAN will provide the right framework in order to perform this transformation in an open manner and keeping at the same time economies of scale thanks to a global adoption.


The presentation also touches on O-RAN Software Community. The O-RAN Alliance recently partnered with the Linux Foundation to establish the O-RAN-Software Community (O-RAN-SC), to provide that open source software application layer to the RAN. O-RAN-SC will foster development of an open source infrastructure platform for running 5G RAN solutions.

The key aspects of ORAN-SC are:
  • New Open Community focused on RAN Software in collaboration with O-RAN Alliance
  • Set up for collaboration across OPNFV, ONAP, Akraino and other Open Source projects

Here is the video of the conference embedded below:



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4 comments:

Unknown said...

Very usefule, can we get in this presentation material? thanks in advance.

Zahid Ghadialy said...

Sorry, it wasn't shared as far as I am aware.

Ashutosh Kaushik said...

I also started doing research on this topic few days back and have gained some good latest info like various engagements in various forums like Akraino etc. Latest specs are under development by Oran alliance and some are already done like WG 4 (open fronthaul group) within ORAN alliance. There are 8 WGs within this alliance to develop specs for various components of ORAN ref architecture as defined & standardized by ORAN and approved by 3GPP.Nokia is sole major vendor to be actively participating and supporting Open RAN as compared to other major vendors like E & H.A major part of ORAN is RIC (Radio Intelligent Controller) comprising both non real time & near real time functions. Many new interfaces are also defined like A1 ,E2, F2 , E1 , W1 etc. VRAN is one of the steps towards True ORAN , as of course you want to virtualise RAN first for taking most benefit of openness from operator perspective.

Zahid Ghadialy said...

Thanks Ashutosh.