Berlin, August-November 2023
The i14y Lab consortium invited all vendors of Open RAN-related solutions and platforms to the O-RAN Global Plugfest Fall 2023. The testing in Berlin was closely aligned with other European PlugFest hosts, and with Telecom Infra Project (TIP) activities.
During the event, participating vendors got the opportunity to validate the technical readiness of their individual solutions, explore multi-vendor interoperability in new or refined test scenarios, and prepare test results for public reporting. The tests were based on O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications and TIP test plans customized for this session. We took technical priorities provided by the OpenRAN MoU Group of European service providers into account as well.
All tests were executed in a vendor-neutral environment with multiple test tools and partially automated test execution. The specific list of applicable tests and low-level steps was selected together with interested participants in preparation for the PlugFest.
Our high-level test scope was:
- Verification of O-RAN-based O-RU, O-DU/O-CU implementations for Open Fronthaul functions and performance
- Testing of multi-vendor O-RAN-based end-to-end solutions (including products and solutions aligned with TIP requirements documents):
- Systems under test: O-RU + O-DU + O-CU
- Optionally including Near-RT RIC with xApps
- Optionally including Non-RT RIC with rApps
- Optionally including NETCONF-based SMO solutions with standards-based Yang models
- Including indoor disaggregated small-cell systems using TIP-specified end-to-end test plans
- Evaluation of network optimization use case scenarios
- Near-RT and non-RT RICs implementing A1/E2 interfaces
- xApps and non-RT RIC rApps in standalone emulation scenarios
New or improved test cases that are developed as part of this event were upstreamed to the respective SDO.