Issue link: https://hub.radisys.com/i/1302511
radisys.com 11 Radisys Series — Who Disaggregated My RAN? eBook The O-RAN Alliance, in its efforts to standardize all infrastructure and management aspects, has multiple working groups addressing operations and management, cloudification and hardware abstraction aspects. With standardization on the management aspects too and with RAN becoming cloud native, orchestration vendors are able to introduce a standard software lifecycle management, scaling up and down network functions, all of which was previously impossible. Service Management Orchestrators (SMOs) bring in a whole new level of sophistication in the operation of RAN along with efficiency improvement and OpEx benefits. Future Ecosystem Growth and New Vendor Categories A new area of growth for the Open RAN ecosystem comes from outside the base station that provides operators with an increased layer of intelligence. The RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) is a part of the O RAN Alliance specification focusing on delivering radio resource management, higher layer procedure optimization, and policy optimization in the RAN. The O-RAN Alliance recently published standards for RIC and this will usher in a whole new variety of vendors specializing in AI/ML, Big data and highly specialized apps and algorithms to solve RAN specific problems and optimizations. I will cover this topic in detail in this blog very soon. Vendors of test solutions in the RAN space are also racing against time to deliver new products and capabilities to test the new interfaces and nodes of Open RAN. This ensures conformance against emerging standards and interoperability among vendors. The O-RAN Alliance is also ensuring this by publishing conformance and interoperability test specifications and conducting Plugfest (Interop) events regularly. The Road Ahead I have tried to present an across the spectrum view of the new Open RAN ecosystem so far. While promising freedom of choice to operators, the new vendors are providing cost optimized and innovative solutions. This ecosystem being built up around the open disaggregated RAN will continue to evolve. The newer players are already disrupting and creating irreversible change like the rest of the computing industry has gone through, bringing with it a new ecosystem and new opportunities. This momentum is undeniably felt in one category that I deliberately did not cover. In my next blog in this series, I will take a deep look at this important category - the last mile in Open RAN - the fronthaul and the radio.