Fujitsu highlights Open RAN security and service management and orchestration at Mobile World Congress 2023
Open RAN progress, both as an ideological movement and a specific set of interoperable, standards-based technologies, was on display this year at Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona. Evidenced by ongoing advancements from an ever-growing pool of vendors working collaboratively, and by operator announcements for both greenfield and brownfield deployment, the hype is quickly turning into a commercial reality. But as with any new technology, opportunities also come with challenges.
Speaking to RCR Wireless News, Fujitsu Software Solutions Architect David Allabaugh, noted Fujitsu’s decade of work on open networking, and the five years of work put in by the O-RAN Alliance. “The operators themselves continue to make announcements,” he said. “It’s obvious they’re very positive, optimistic, about the ability of this technology to transform the network, the way it operates, the industry itself. So we do feel like [Open RAN is] ready.”
In terms of scaled Open RAN deployments, the majority of the action today is with greenfield operators Rakuten Mobile, 1&1 and Dish Wireless. For these operators who don’t have to consider interworking with legacy assets, the cloud-native approach to networking “gives you a lot of advantages in terms of flexibility…essentially being able to pick best-in-breed,” Allabaugh said. “The cloud-native approach allows for both more rapid, more flexible deployment of the network functions and the solutions in terms of applications, but also moving towards cloud-native approaches and techniques such as CI/CD.”
With cloud-native, open networking comes a pointed need to more flexibly manage and orchestrate the network. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have an important role to play in making this possible, Allabaugh said. Fujitsu is “bringing in AI/ML capabilities to handle the complexities that are coming out in the new, modern, virtualized, containerized, cloud-native networks…You need AI/ML to be able to help with the decisions because static policy or static scripts and policies just won’t do it anymore.”
But Open RAN traction isn’t limited to greenfield operators; case in point, five major multinational European operators have all committed to scaled Open RAN deployments in the coming years. How should brownfield operators think about turning up service management and orchestration systems for their disaggregated networks alongside existing internal and customer-facing systems?
“With a brownfield,” Allabaugh said, “not everything can be open…So if you have traditional or single-vendor solutions, bringing open in helps to start to give you that flexibility…It’s not an all or nothing proposition there.” In terms of that transition to open and cloud-native alongside legacy operations, “Automation and orchestration can apply both to the new and to the old.”
As operators invest heavily in cutting-edge 5G networking technologies, there’s a lingering question about how that flexibility can be monetized. Allabaugh put it like this: “Automation gives you increases in network performance, in security…giving you faster time-to-market and better performance…All of those are important to the verticals.” In order to provide service level agreements to enterprise customers with very specific performance requirements, “Automation gives you the ability to do that with apps either optimizing or assuring those levels that are necessary. And then beyond that, there’s the factor of innovation. So it’s not just being able to get a good network, it’s being able to constantly evolve that network, and that’s what verticals are going to be needing as they bring in new applications that are specific to their space.”
Single-vendor vs. multi-vendor RAN security
One of the sell-against points put into market by incumbent RAN vendors is that Open RAN is not as secure as single-vendor solutions. While this point has been thoroughly addressed by standards bodies, vendors and, in some cases, government organizations, it still lingers. We asked Fujitsu’s Head of Cybersecurity Services Nimal Gunarathna for his perspective.
“Open RAN is secure,” he emphatically said. “But there’s an argument in the industry saying that the system is complex, it automatically becomes insecure. But that’s not true.” He noted the company’s history of providing end-to-end security through from architecting and design to implementation and operation. “Security is scrutinized, verified, tested in every stage of the software development lifecycle. As long as we do that same process—a proven process all along from A to Z—…the risk can be minimized so the systems become secure.”
Because Open RAN involves multiple hardware and software vendors, as compared to an integrated, single-vendor RAN, that means that feature updates result from multiple, coordinated software pushes as opposed to a single software push. Gunarathna said this means operators need to effectively collaborate with their vendors, and other relevant parties, to maintain system security throughout this process. Additionally, radio systems should have security standards built in and continuously assessed for compliance.
