Telecom Infra Project (TIP) recently released a major Test Plan for End-to-End Validation (e2e) performance test cases for TIP OpenRAN community review. The contributors to the document include AT&T, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and Aspire Technology. TIP invites the community to review, give feedback and propose changes where necessary. The Review period will be set for 45 days (Feb 15th) by the Project Group, in which we expect the TIP community to refine the test cases further and harmonize across a wider set of Mobile Network Operators and vendors.
The target for the Test Plan has been creating Test Cases that address e2e Open RAN performance, which has been largely missing from the Open RAN industry.
TIP’s e2e Test Plan is designed to mitigate risks and ensure robust Open RAN deployments. Where the blueprint defines the strategy, the test plan delivers the execution. TIP’s Test Plan ensures that Open RAN solutions are rigorously tested under real-world conditions, bridging the gap between theoretical design and practical deployment. The test plan outlines a comprehensive framework for validating Open RAN solutions, focusing on performance, energy efficiency, and deployment readiness. The plan establishes a common minimum set of configuration parameters necessary for consistent and replicable testing. The test plan evaluates key aspects of Open RAN systems, including RAN features like automated neighbor relations and handover scenarios, ensuring robustness in realistic deployments. It includes performance tests to validate throughput, modulation schemes, and MIMO capabilities under varying radio conditions, as well as operational tests covering lifecycle management tasks such as power cycling and software updates. Additionally, resilience tests assess the system’s stability and recovery under fault scenarios, ensuring high availability and minimal disruption during failures.
The parameters ensure comparability across different tests while capturing system-level and equipment-specific configurations critical for validation.
Test Cases
The test cases address testing of key RAN features of macro deployment, operational and performance validations, including:
- RAN Features: Validates advanced RAN functionalities, such as automated neighbor relations, pre-scheduling, and handover scenarios (intra/inter-DU, intra/inter-CU). Ensures feature robustness under realistic deployment scenarios.
- Performance Tests: Verifies throughput, modulation schemes, and MIMO capabilities under varying radio conditions. Includes tests such as 1024QAM performance, TDD slot pattern evaluation, and throughput stability with extended cyclic prefix configurations
- Operational Tests: Evaluate lifecycle management capabilities, including power cycling, software updates, and alarm management for Open RAN components, ensuring the system meets real-world deployment challenges.
- Resilience Tests: Assess system stability, recovery, and high-availability performance under various fault scenarios, such as pod restarts, hardware failures, synchronization holdovers, and prolonged network stress. These tests validate the system’s ability to recover gracefully, maintain connectivity, and ensure minimal disruption during critical failure events.
Each test is designed to comprehensively validate the Open RAN system’s performance, efficiency, and interoperability, ensuring it meets the demands of scalable and reliable real-world deployments while minimizing risks. The Test Plan objective is to provide repeatable and consistent results. A major effort was spent by the contributors on:
- Defining measurements and expected results in detail.
- Definition of Success Criteria for the tests. Each test case includes success criteria for a successful test by the contributors.
- Reducing as much as possible situations where results could be interpreted in various ways.
The test plan targets that Open RAN solutions are fully deployment-ready, instilling confidence in MNOs to integrate these technologies seamlessly into live networks. The contributors are also working to release a Blueprint definition for a macro network configuration that will reflect the test plan to the TIP community in early 2025.
For more insights and collaboration opportunities on the blueprint and test plans, visit TIP’s resources or contact the TIP Team. To learn more about the Open RAN Project Group, visit: https://telecominfraproject.com/openran/