Tag: ORAN

RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) is to enable abstracting out part of functionality from the eNB or gNB that was traditionally hosted at the base station in the form of xApps or rApps in the O-RAN architecture. The functions, to which we relate here in the RAN domain include e.g., mobility management or interference management. The decisions are made in the xApps, and RIC then enforces policies towards the RAN elements and controls them using the open interface, namely E2. In this post, we elaborate on the RIC, its functional split, xApps, and rApps.

The goal of Non-RT RIC is to support intelligent RAN optimization by providing policy-based guidance, model management, and enrichment information to the Near-RT RIC function so that the RAN can be optimized. Non-RT RIC works within the management plane and operates on seconds and minutes timescale. In this post, we provide the architecture of the Non-RT RIC and discuss the example applications, called rApps.

In the past couple of months, we delivered several webinars together with Intelefy University related to Open RAN. In this post, you can find the collection of them, in the particular order, where the first one serves as an overview and high-level discussion, whereas the next ones dig more and more into details of O-RAN, as specified by O-RAN ALLIANCE.

In this post, we focus on the implementation of a simple xApp tailored for the traffic steering use case. The goal of this xApp is to support the network providers to reassign the traffic from one gNB to the other in order to meet some predefined criteria. We will see some results of the great opportunity offered by Open RAN that the operator can easily install, modify or remove the xApp when needed.

In this post, we briefly present, how the concept of open RAN meets immediately one of the key approaches in distributed software design, mainly CI/CD. Clearly, these two domains cannot be compared directly, but as we will see, the O-RAN concept modifies significantly the whole software design process.

Open RAN is the separation of software functionality from the underlying hardware. This is called “disaggregation.” It is also the process of defining functional blocks in the network and clearly and precisely specifying the interfaces between those functional blocks. Most who study such things believe it to be true. But before we break out the Champaign, we should be a bit more circumspect and evaluate the threats to Open RAN. What might prevent Open RAN from reaching its potential?