Built on the Keysight O-RAN Architect solution, the lab offers a setup to conduct radio unit testing
Keysight announced it is launching its first complete Open RAN (O-RAN) testing laboratory for Europe at the company’s Milan office in Italy.
The company noted that the main aim of the new facility is to assist European-based mobile operators and network equipment manufacturers with verifying the interoperability and performance of their O-RAN solutions.
“This complete, one-stop test setup simplifies the sharing of results across the entire workflow and speeds time to market,” said Carlo Santangelo, EMEAI solutions engineer director at Keysight. “With our broad portfolio, we are offering the most comprehensive lab setup for radio unit testing, complete with network and user equipment emulators and radio frequency equipment.”
Built on the Keysight Open RAN Architect (KORA) solution, the laboratory offers an edge-to-core setup to conduct radio unit testing aligned to the latest conformance tests from the O-RAN Alliance. Through early testing during the development cycle, Keysight said it can help accelerate the deployment of virtualized platforms to support the demands of 5G O-RAN.
The company also highlighted that KORA solutions enable conformance, interoperability, performance and security testing across the entire O-RAN lifecycle with suites specifically tailored for chipset makers, software stack developers, network equipment manufacturers, mobile operators, and Open Test and Integration Centers (OTIC).
In January, Keysight Technologies said it joined 16 other companies and organizations to coordinate a European 6G testbed program, the 6G-SANDBOX program funded by Horizon Europe to help promote a European supply chain for advanced wireless systems.
6G-SANDBOX is one of 35 new projects, funded to the tune of about 250 million euros, that are part of the European Commission’s Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking, established in 2021. The overarching project seeks to develop “EU-wide experimentation platforms to test promising technical 6G enablers,” Keysight noted, such as network intelligence, artificial intelligence, security, flexible multi-tenancy architecture, digital twins, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.
Keysight said that the 6G testbed will “combine digital and physical nodes to deliver fully configurable, manageable, and controllable end-to-end networks for validating new technologies and research advancements for 6G.” It will not be a single testbed location, but rather four experimental platforms — one each in Spain, Germany, Finland and Greece — that will allow organizations to conduct testing and trials.
