O-RAN Alliance partners with OAI, announces new specifications

The O-RAN Alliance also announced that the O-RAN Release 003 includes 10 new specification titles

The O-RAN Alliance signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OAI), in which both entities agreed to cooperate on O-RAN issues, open source software development, and 5G.

Under the terms of the deal, both organizations will encourage sharing of information in areas of mutual interest and may hold joint meetings and workshops.

Alex Jinsung Choi, chair of the board of O-RAN Alliance and SVP of Technology at Deutsche Telekom, said: “The MoU will strengthen our cooperation in development of open source software for the RAN. It will allow a more focused cooperation between both organizations and will enhance our software development.”

Firstly, the OAI software follows the O-RAN architecture and paves the way for showcasing the next generation cellular wireless technologies. Secondly, the two organizations are very complementary in their value propositions. We look forward to capitalizing on this collaboration in the future,” said Raymond Knopp, president of the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance.

The O-RAN Alliance also announced 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.

The O-RAN Alliance also said that the O-RAN Release 003 includes 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

-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 alliance also announced that the O-RAN Release 003 includes 10 new specification titles:

-Network Energy Savings Use Cases Technical Report

-Decoupled SMO Architecture Technical Report

-Application Protocols for R1 Services

-O1 Interface Specification for Near-RT RIC

-Near-RT RIC APIs specification

-Requirements and Reference Design Specification for Enterprise Microcell

-Study on Security for Application Lifecycle Management

-Study on Security Log Management

-Study on Security for Service Management and Orchestration (SMO)

-Study on Security for Shared O-RU

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.