The O-RAN Software Community (SC) is a collaboration between the O-RAN Alliance and Linux Foundation with the mission to support the creation of software for the Radio Access Network (RAN). The RAN is the next challenge for the open source community. The O-RAN SC plans to leverage other LF network projects, while addressing the challenges in performance, scale, and 3GPP alignment.
The telecom industry is experiencing a profound transformation and 5G is expected to radically change how we live, work, and play. This means it’s critical to make network infrastructure commercially available as quickly as possible to ensure business success for operators. It’s time to turn to open source, as it is one of the most efficient ways to accelerate product development in a collaborative and cost-efficient way.
The O-RAN Software Community is focused on aligning with the O-RAN Alliance’s open architecture and specifications to achieve a solution that can be utilized for industry deployment. As a new open source community under the Linux Foundation, the O-RAN SC is sponsored by the O-RAN Alliance, and will enable the development of open source software enabling modular, open, intelligent, efficient, and agile disaggregated radio access networks.
The initial set of software projects being discussed may include: near-real-time RAN intelligent controller (nRT RIC), non-real-time RAN intelligent controller (NRT RIC), cloudification and virtualization platforms, open central unit (O-CU), open distributed unit (O-DU), and a test and integration effort to provide a working reference implementation. These efforts will be looking to work with other adjacent open source networking communities, so the O-RAN Software Community can enable collaborative development across the full operator network stack with strong community alignment.
The community will target an initial release before the end of 2019. It will take multiple releases to fully implement a functional stack. We invite you to join the community in its efforts to open the RAN and leverage software to enrich 5G and beyond solutions for users worldwide.
You can get started with joining the mailing list and Technical Oversight Community (TOC) meetings.
Big Challenges:
- Build commercially viable solutions that meet high performing KPI requirements that support real-time system needs.
- Leverage adjacent software communities and open approaches to utilize existing solutions to speed time to market.
Mission:
- Manage all software development, code storage, tooling and developer integration testing aligned with the architecture specified by O-RAN Alliance.
Project Scope:
- Software development including documentation, testing and integration of the open source software project.
- Coordinate efforts with related open source software projects and standards communities.
- Aligned with O-RAN architecture.
Licensing:
- Standard Apache 2 license for Open Source software contributions.
O-RAN Architecture Diagram
