The university noted that the new facility has been approved by the O-RAN Alliance
The Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things (WIoT) at Northeastern University opened an Open Testing and Integration Center (OTIC) in Burlington, Massachusetts, to promote research, development and testing of next-generation Open RAN (O-RAN).
The university noted that the OTIC, which has been approved by the O-RAN Alliance, will be a resource for industry, academia and the federal government to provide testing, certification and badging capabilities to guarantee multi-vendor interoperability, perform compliance and performance testing and validate end-to-end control logic as well as test artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to control open and programmable cellular networks.
The OTIC will also provide testing equipment and services to validate disaggregated base stations and RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs), including custom applications. The university also said that end-to-end intelligent applications will be able to be tested against different RAN implementations in emulated or over-the-air environments.
The new Northeastern OTIC builds on facilities and capabilities available in the Open6G center, which will be expanded with dedicated testing equipment. Key capabilities include:
-Large-scale experimental wireless testbeds: The university highlighted that the Colosseum, funded by the National Science Foundation, is the world’s largest wireless network emulator, with 256 software-defined radios and 25 server racks equipped with programmable GPUs, FPGAs, and orchestration tools. Colosseum has hosted demonstrations of closed-loop control with xApps in O-RAN using the OpenRAN Gym framework, large-scale data collection for AI/ML training and extensive testing of commercial radios and emulated devices. (It also made an appearance on the show floor of 2019’s Mobile World Congress Los Angeles.)
-FCC Innovation Zone: The OTIC is part of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Innovation Zone, which covers multiple 5G bands in the Northeastern University campuses in Boston and Burlington. This allows over-the-air testing of O-RAN systems in a variety of different environments, according to the university.
-Diverse 5G RAN deployments: The OTIC encompasses multiple 5G RAN deployments, including commercial/proprietary as well as Open RAN products such as 5G user equipment (UE), core networks and a programmable 5G O-RAN testbed with over 10 base stations in the indoor Arena testbed.
The OTIC is co-located with a large outdoor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) testing facility to explore use cases related to drone mobility and with an anechoic chamber designed to conduct interference-free radio device testing.
The Northeastern OTIC has been launched in partnership with AT&T, Verizon and Dish Wireless. The WIoT industry consortium includes about 20 vendors, operators, over-the-top system integrators and small businesses in the telecom space.
“Northeastern’s Open6G is at the forefront of innovation in Open RAN testing, architectures, algorithms, software and experimentation. Together with our partners, we are creating an innovation and testing ecosystem that will continue to serve the federal government, industry, and academia,” said Tommaso Melodia, director of Northeastern’s Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things.
The OTIC will provide services to clients through remote and physical access.
In April, the WIoT at Northeastern University and its Open6G R&D Center had announced the availability of its private 5G network fully automated through AI. The university noted that the private network is built on open-source components enabling a fully virtualized O-RAN-compliant network in a campus environment.
