The O-RAN Alliance Announces New Open Fronthaul Specification, Demos and Industry Event at Mobile World Congress 2019

The O-RAN Alliance announced today that it will be releasing the first O-RAN standard Open Fronthaul Specifications comprised of control, user, synchronization and management plane protocols.

Sachin Katti, Stanford University Professor and O-RAN TSC co-chair said, “we are excited to release the first O-RAN Open Fronthaul Specification. O-RAN has leveraged significant specification work done in xRAN and will accelerate interoperability testing and product commercialization. Further, the O-RAN fronthaul workgroup has also started discussions on potential new study items to pursue for 2019.”

An O-RAN industry event will kick off the MWC activities on Monday February 25^th at 6:00pm, hosted by Deutsche Telekom on its stage in Hall 3. Following this event, O-RAN Alliance members will showcase six strategic proof-of-concepts across various member booths covering four key themes: intelligent RAN control, Open Interfaces, virtualization and white box.

Chih-Lin I, China Mobile Chief Scientist and O-RAN TSC co-chair said, “Building on the ICDT convergence momentum accelerated by the O-RAN leadership, and the foundation of the long-term C-RAN Alliance partnership, we are excited to showcase several proof-of-concepts demonstrating the progress toward a more open and intelligent RAN.”

The first demo, "O-RAN aligned implementation of Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) Load Balancing" showcases predictive load balancing using Smart Radio Fingerprint technology that provides opportunities to interoperability using O-RAN architecture interfaces and established industry elements. The solution enables the accurate redirection of UE attachment, optimized load balancing, and improved user experience. This demo is being sponsored and hosted by China Mobile and ZTE at their respective booths.

The second demo, “AI empowered User Quality of Experience (QoE),” showcases predictive user QoE enabled by machine learning micro services chained together, to autonomously recognize traffic types in real-time, predict quality and provide closed-loop network controls resulting in a consistent, high-quality 5G user experience. This demo is being sponsored by China Mobile and Nokia; and hosted in the China Mobile booth.

The third demo, “Open Fronthaul Interface,” showcases the use of O-RAN’s Open Front Haul specification with a variety of vendors to achieve interoperability between the O-DU and O-RU enabled by a fully specified control, user, synchronization and management plane protocols. This demo is being sponsored by Verizon, NTT DOCOMO, KT Corporation, SK telecom, Fujitsu, HFR, Intel, Keysight, Mavenir, NEC and SOLiD; and hosted by NTT DOCOMO, KT Corporation, Keysight, Mavenir and NEC at their respective booths.

The fourth demo, “Virtualized O-CU on Akraino edge cloud orchestrated by ONAP,” showcases the integration of virtualized CU with a community supported Akraino edge stack blueprint packaged into a “cloud appliance” enabling the flexibility of virtualization and cloud, while retaining the simplicity and low cost of an appliance. This demo is being sponsored by AT&T and Nokia; and hosted in the Nokia booth.

The fifth demo, “Programmable mmWave White-Box Radio Unit,” showcases a mmWave smart O-RU transmitting a 5G NR signal with 100MHz bandwidth using a 5G open RAN test platform and a 28 GHz O-RU whitebox with a beamformed active antenna system to two UEs test emulators. This demo is being sponsored by AT&T, Anokiwave, Ball Aerospace, Xilinx and Keysight; and hosted in the Xilinx booth.

The sixth and final set of demos, “Open hardware reference design for sub 6GHz indoor coverage,” showcase two live demos of white-box and general-purpose hardware supporting sub 6GHz indoor coverage deployment scenarios for both 4G and 5G. The first demo is being sponsored by China Mobile, Lenovo, Baicells; and hosted at Lenovo booth. The second demo is being sponsored by China Telecom, Intel, H3C; and hosted in the Intel booth.

In a true demonstration of the momentum behind the global O-RAN Alliance effort over 150 members from nearly 80 different companies will be hosted by Telefonica in Madrid this week for a 4-day work summit to help accelerate the delivery of new specifications expected to be delivered in the first half of 2019.

The O-RAN Alliance event will feature speakers Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom, Andre Fuestch, President AT&T Labs / Chief Technology Officer and a panel discussion with Sachin Katti, Chih-Lin I and technical experts from Nokia and Intel moderated by Gabriel Brown, Analyst for Heavy Reading.

For more information about the MWC demos and their locations link to https://o-ran.net on your mobile device.

About O-RAN Alliance

The O-RAN Alliance is a world-wide, carrier-led effort to drive new levels of openness in the radio access network of next generation wireless systems. Future RANs will be built on a foundation of virtualized network elements, white-box hardware and standardized interfaces that fully embrace O-RAN’s core principles of intelligence and openness. An ecosystem of innovative new products is already emerging that will form the underpinnings of the multi-vendor, interoperable, autonomous RAN, envisioned by many in the past, but only now enabled by the global industry-wide vision, commitment and leadership of O-RAN Alliance members and contributors.

More information about O-RAN can be found at www.o-ran.org.

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Contact information

For more information, contact:
Rod Stuhlmuller pr@o-ran.org