VIAVI is collaborating with different industry players like NTT DoCoMo to enable simplification and efficiencies with Open RAN
NTT DoCoMo is using the VIAVI Solutions test suite for end-to-end testing for its 5G Open RAN Ecosystem (OREX), which was launched last year and is designed to extend ubiquitous connectivity for users around the world by allowing them to validate their own virtualized RAN. At the recent Fyuz event in Madrid, Sameh Yamany, the CTO at VIAVI, and Sadayuki Abeta, the VP and GM of RAN development at NTT DoCoMo, spoke with RCR Wireless News about how OREX, as well as digital twins, are giving operators the confidence they need to take on the transition to Open RAN.
“The whole idea of openness is the ability to bring-in other innovative ideas, and this means that the testing has to be programmable,” said Yamany. He added that testing also must be more “realistic” than in the past to fully address how Open RAN can improve real networks. The promise of innovation, he continued, is what makes Open RAN so attractive, but the required integration also makes it very complex.
“So how can we simplify?” Abeta asked. With OREX, NTT DoCoMo is spreading the cost of integration, as well as staff resources, amongst operators. “On behalf of the operators, we do the integration, and provide the pre-integration solution,” he explained. As Yamany put it, OREX is a sort of blueprint that guides operators around the world towards more open and disaggregated networks. VIAVI is specifically supporting OREX with its TM500 Network Tester, TM500 O-DU Tester, the TeraVM O-CU Tester and the TeraVM Core solutions.
And now, VIAVI can provide even more opportunities for innovation through digital network replicas. “The digital twin is going to give service providers confidence… but it also opens ways for really new innovation… Maybe they never [had] the whole picture of the network. Now, they can actually test as if they are running in the real network,” he said.
Operators can feed data from a live network into the digital twin, enabling it to continuously behave more and more like a real network. Then, when tools like artificial intelligence are added on top of this, operators can ask the digital twin to show potential outcomes when certain metrics are adjusted. “You can ask the digital twin, ‘What if I do this?’ Now, it’s going to respond to you, as a real network would respond to you,” stated Yamany. This, he believes, is the “future of networking.”
In closing, Yamany commented on how much cooperation VIAVI is seeing when it comes to building out the Open RAN ecosystem, and how OREX is a prime example. “This is something that the industry is looking for… building these services so that you don’t have to worry about building your own lab. You can use something like OREX, and you can get the confidence. We can actually add more service[s] when we’re working with partner[s]. And I think this is the road for what we’re going to see next… This is not the end of the story; this is just the beginning,” he said.
