An interview with Ganesh Shenbagaraman, Head of Standards and Ecosystems at Radisys Corporation
The telecom industry is currently seeing good momentum for Open RAN adoption and deployment. Recently, RCR Wireless News caught up with Ganesh Shenbagaraman, Head of Standards and Ecosystems at Radisys, to talk about upcoming Open RAN initiatives and what he believes will be the future momentum of 5G and 6G.
“We are seeing some forward momentum and real-life examples of progress in Open RAN,” he explained during an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “We have the O-RAN Alliance, [and] there are multiple vendor consortiums, where we see interoperability coming into play. A network like DISH, which is multi-vendor and operational today, is an excellent live example of how things can be made to work in Open RAN.”
However, Shenbagaraman highlighted that there is still a lot of work to do to accelerate O-RAN deployments. “Open RAN is not still a plug-and-play story,” he said. “While Open RAN standards are maturing, we still need to continue the good work that has been done to improve interoperability and achieve the plug-and-play capabilities Open RAN solutions provide. More test centers are being established and vendors are becoming more proactive in terms of O-RAN testing. We would like to see this going into the next level of maturity, where operators or private network enterprises that are deploying the solution can have a certain level of faith towards the success of Open RAN. That’s going to take additional effort.”
Radisys continues to collaborate with others in the Open RAN ecosystem to drive standards-based interoperability and demonstrate the viability of multi-vendor solutions. In September 2023, Radisys was awarded the Mobility Winner Prize in the Inter-Vendor Mobility Prize category in Stage Four of the 2023 5G Challenge hosted by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Institute for Telecommunications Services in collaboration with the Department of Defense. Radisys received the Mobility Prize for demonstrating the successful integration of its combined Open RAN central unit (CU) and distributed unit (DU) along with partner Lions’ radio unit (RU) during the final element of the 2023 5G Challenge. Radisys was also selected as a winner in the Wrap-Around Emulation category and was selected as the second-place winner for the Multi-Vendor End-to-End Integration prize.
“What we demonstrated at the end of this 5G Challenge was the first-ever mobility handover scenario between two different Open RAN vendors. That was seen as a significant milestone and a highlight of that event,” said Shenbagaraman.
Commenting about the integration of Mimosa into Radisys following the acquisition of this company in 2023 from Airspan Networks, Shenbagaraman noted that “Mimosa nicely fits into our portfolio, and we are now able to offer a unified access portfolio to our customers.”
Mimosa brings a diverse product set of point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connectivity solutions that leverage unlicensed spectrum bands. This enables the rapid rollout of multi-gigabit-per-second fixed wireless access networks and wireless backhaul connectivity for telecommunications systems and latency-sensitive 5G applications.
Meanwhile, regarding the ongoing evolution of 5G technology, Shenbagaraman said that Radisys is already working on 5G-Advanced. “We are already implementing some of the newer features in 5G satellite communication, and more MIMO-related and mobility-related optimization. We will be incorporating advanced features progressively into our products,” he said. At MWC, Radisys announced the launch of its 5G Advanced Wireless Connectivity software that enables next-generation 5G advanced features to deliver improved accessibility and flexibility for low latency, cloud-native solutions for both the RAN and Core networks.
“But in the long term, the evolution of radio networks will involve greater applications of AI. We are talking about AI-native radio access networks coming into the picture for Layer 1 and Layer 2 functions. How do we intelligently control traffic radio resource management interference in all these aspects? All the elements, except probably the radio, will be cloud native. This is what we foresee in the future of RAN network evolution,” he said. “These elements will be built into 6G standards and Open RAN will be the foundation stone of 6G.”
