Tag: Traffic Steering

This blog details our work on extending Traffic Steering within the O-RAN framework through Hierarchical Traffic Management. We evaluate it in a challenging scenario involving a heterogeneous network with high mobility, where the behavior and service usage of UEs change significantly over time. The use case addresses dynamic network changes, including the appearance of high-priority emergency services like Emergency Special Services and First Responders and a complex denial of service cyberattack during high-demand situations.

In the current heterogeneous mobile networks, traffic management is considered one of the key features to efficiently handle non-uniform user data. To realize this, the traffic steering function is employed, whose main task is to allocate users' traffic flows to network nodes or cells. O-RAN ALLIANCE provides means to support traffic steering through the utilization of Non- and Near-RT RIC frameworks and the accompanied rApps and xApps. This whitepaper provides an overview of the traffic steering topic in 5G mobile networks and how it fits into the O-RAN area. This is followed up by example implementations of the Traffic Steering xApp and its utilization for various use cases working in tandems with the corresponding rApps for energy saving and V2X scenarios.

This blog post discusses in detail two options for notification of the TS-xApp on the ES actions from the O-RAN specifications perspective. The first option is to utilize the A1 interface to send policies with a “FORBID” clause for cells that will be switched off, to indicate TS-xApp that users should be removed from this cell. The second approach is to utilize the E2SM-CCC, where the TS-xApp listens to the changes in O-CES Management Function.

In this blog post, we show how the utilization of both Traffic Management rApp and Traffic Steering xApp could help in V2X scenarios. We also emphasize the use of enrichment information, made available through O-RAN, that suits specifically to vehicular services, such as car platoon geolocation or emergency situation notifications. The flexibility offered by the O-RAN architecture allows for optimized resource management through policy control in companion with EI when dynamic changes occur on the road. This is analyzed within the context of specific O-RAN use cases related to V2X.

Rimedo Labs integrated a Traffic Steering xApp into the VMware dRIC. Rimedo’s Policy-Controlled Traffic Steering xApp running on the VMware Distributed RIC incorporates both service and mobility load balancing to avoid congestion, improve user experience and make the network more energy efficient. Rimedo’s xApp was the winner of the inaugural rAppathon RIC application developer competition hosted by VMware and Intel at MWC 2023.

The O-RAN Alliance specifies certain use cases with requirements that provide a landscape for the development of xApps. This post provides an overview of the use cases and discusses in more details one of them, namely Traffic Steering. This use case is being developed in various open source implementations as one of the initial practical applications within O-RAN framework.