Outdoor trial on 4G and 5G integrates ONF SD-RAN’s RIC and eight vendors’ products in ongoing field trial
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and Deutsche Telekom (DT) have announced the launch of the SD-RAN [software-defined radio access network] Berlin Trial.
They say this is the first field trial implementing fully disaggregated, open RAN solutions using ONF’s RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) software platform as defined by the O-RAN architecture.
This 4G and 5G Standalone (SA) outdoor trial is live at Deutsche Telekom in Berlin.
This SD-RAN trial is intended to show the promise and flexibility of open RAN by integrating components from eight companies – AirHop, Edgecore, Facebook, Foxconn, Intel, Radisys, Supermicro and Wiwynn.
The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is providing hardware and facilities from the TIP Community Lab in Berlin hosted by DT. The on-site field trial integration and testing is being coordinated and supported by Highstreet Technologies.
The live trial features horizontally disaggregated hardware – that is, separate radio units (RU), distributed units (DU), and centralised units (CU) – as well as vertically disaggregated software components.
They include an open source, near real-time RIC (nRT-RIC) and xApps from the ONF’s SD-RAN project.
ONF says, “By integrating proprietary and open source components, including a near real-time RIC and xApps, this ground-breaking trial exemplifies a model for how future open RAN deployments are envisioned to take shape.
“The entirety of the trial is operationalized leveraging ONF’s Aether platform, a centrally-managed, multi-cloud, cloud-native platform providing Connectivity-as-a-Service, and highlights network slicing with multiple UPFs [user plane functions] running at the edge.
More information here.