AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Docomo and Orange have jointly created the ORAN Alliance. The group of operators said they aim to drive new levels of openness in the radio access network of next-generation wireless systems. ORAN will combine and extend the efforts of the C-RAN Alliance and the xRAN Forum into a single operator led effort.
The ORAN (Open Radio Access Network) Alliance said it is committed to evolving radio access networks, making them more open and smarter than previous generations. Real-time analytics that drive embedded machine learning systems and artificial intelligence back-end modules are expected to empower network intelligence. Additional virtualized network elements with open, standardized interfaces will be key aspects of the reference designs developed by the ORAN Alliance. Technologies from open source and open whitebox network elements will be important software and hardware components of these reference designs.
The new alliance combines the previous C-RAN Alliance and the xRAN Forum to continue towards open, interoperable interfaces, RAN virtualization, and big data enabled RAN intelligence; maximizing the use of common-off-the-shelf hardware and merchant silicon and minimizing proprietary hardware; as well as specifying APIs and interfaces, driving standards to adopt them as appropriate, and exploring open source where appropriate.
The xRAN Forum was founded in June 2016 by AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom to promote a software-based, extensible Radio Access Network (xRAN) and to standardize critical elements of the xRAN architecture. Work on C-RAN has been led by the industry group Next Generation Mobile Networks and focuses on moving to a more centralised radio network based on cloud computing.
