The O-RAN Alliance also said that O-RAN firms plan to showcase three on-site and 15 virtual demos during Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2023
The O-RAN Alliance announced the completion of the O-RAN Global PlugFest Spring 2023, in which a number of operators carried out critical testing and validation of O-RAN technologies to support and encourage ongoing adoption by the industry.
The O-RAN Global PlugFest Spring 2023 was conducted from April to June 2 in ten labs across Asia, Europe and North America, with 60 participating companies or institutions, the alliance said.
The tests provided participants validation of O-RAN equipment conformance, performance and interoperability, tackled issues and overcome hurdles to wider technology adoption and facilitated exploration of new features, scenarios and applications.
“The sheer scale of participation in O-RAN PlugFests is testament to industry support and momentum of deployment,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, chair of the board of O-RAN ALLIANCE and SVP group technology at Deutsche Telekom. “In the Spring 2023 PlugFest, we expanded the ecosystem by testing products from new vendors. Participants validated the security of end-to-end O-RAN architecture and demonstrated the power of the RIC to support critical use cases such as quality of service and energy efficiency.”
The O-RAN Alliance also said that O-RAN companies plan to showcase three on-site and 15 virtual demonstrations during Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2023, which will take place later this month in Shanghai, China.
Demonstration will include innovations such as indoor positioning applications, cloud economics with 5G and AI applications, intelligent RAN control, machine learning load balancing, and energy-efficient network deployment solutions.
Earlier this year, the O-RAN Alliance said that the O-RAN Release 003 included enhancements to RAN Slicing and SMO features. It also introduces new features including:
-Security requirements and countermeasures for RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) interfaces and apps, O-Cloud and O2 interface
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-Security technical reports with threat and risk analysis outputs for application lifecycle management, log management, service management and orchestration, shared O-RU
-RIC-enabled massive MIMO optimization for non-Grid of Beams (GoB) beamforming method
-RAN Analytics Information Exposure (RAIE) use cases and RIC architecture enhancements for extending RAN-aware optimization capabilities to external services and applications
The O-RAN Release 002 focuses on enabling Open Intelligence. Features in this release included specifications for traffic steering, quality of service and quality of experience optimization, RAN slicing, and service management and orchestration.
O-RAN Release 001 focused on creating open interfaces that include open fronthaul, transport, hardware and cloud.
The O-RAN Alliance had previously said that two new open testing and integration centers (OTIC) were approved in the Asia Pacific region. With the new additions of the Asia & Pacific OTIC by ritt7layers and Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore, there are now 11 approved OTICs across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, the alliance said.
OTICs are vendor-independent, open, and qualified labs approved by the O-RAN Alliance that issue awards in the O-RAN Certification and Badging Program.