TIP is pleased to receive the fourth Release of Technical Documents from the Open RAN MoU Group as a contribution to the OpenRAN PG; their work is a prime example of the steady progress and commitment of Open RAN in the industry. Same as with the previous releases, the Technical Documents will constitute a valuable input into TIP’s OpenRAN Release Framework and its continuous iterations. TIP will build on the Group’s work with the industry at large to harmonize a community-driven roadmap, avoiding fragmentation and continuing to accelerate Open RAN adoption. TIP would like to take this opportunity to encourage the wider Open RAN ecosystem to actively participate in this process, with the potential to develop industry-led requirements that could be used as the basis for certification, promoting an efficient supply chain.
Open RAN Technical Priorities Release 4 is an update of the documents published in June 2021 (Release 1), March 2022 (Release 2) and April 2023 (Release 3) respectively. It is the result of the work carried out under the MoU on Open RAN signed by Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange S.A., Telefónica S.A., TIM S.p.A. and Vodafone Group Plc.
While Release 1 focused on the main scenarios and technical requirements for each of the building blocks of a multi-vendor RAN, Release 2 mainly focused on intelligence, orchestration, transport and cloud infrastructure, addressing also the energy efficiency goals and targets to support sustainable Open RAN and Release 3 mainly focused on developing requirements on SMO and RIC building blocks and enhance other areas such as Cloud infrastructure, O-CU/O-DU and O-RU, addressing also the security topic to support more secure Open RAN.
The fourth release of the technical priorities has primarily focused on developing further requirements on SMO especially related to AI/ML framework, interworking with traditional RAN and slicing management and on Security with MoU operator vision about the zero trust approach and requirements for certification and also on Cloud infrastructure mainly focused on O2 and Acceleration Abstraction Layer, while other areas have been significantly enhanced such as RAN software, O-RU and O-CU/DU. Moreover, this new release focuses in more detail on RAN hardware acceleration topic and various challenges related to the two look-aside and in-line acceleration card models. In particular, the RAN HW acceleration requirements are now contained within a dedicated section of the MoU Technical Priorities document.
The overall objective is to promote a fast pace for the development of competitive Open RAN solutions in Europe, across other regions and ultimately accelerate the global adoption of the technology. The Open RAN MoU Group technical priorities, as with any industry-driven requirements developed through TIP, will evolve over time following the progress of O-RAN ALLIANCE standardisation, in the respective standardization bodies, and market development of Open RAN solutions.
Link to the MoU group requirement document contributions will be made available to the TIP community for review and comment via the TIP OpenRAN PG Hivebrite collaboration space. If you’d like to learn more about the MoU group, including previous versions of these requirements documents, please visit https://telecominfraproject.com/openran-mou-group/