Next March, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Institute for Telecommunications Science and the Department of Defense’s FutureG Office will hold an invite-only event at which telecom companies and academic researchers will have a chance to demonstrate (not simulate) applications for the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and the impacts that they can have on a 5G Open RAN network.
NTIA/ITS and the Department of Defense Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) FutureG Office announced this week that they’ve selected 10 main presenters to demonstrate RIC apps during the RIC Forum. Those main presenters are:
- AT&T Corp.
- Accelleran
- Capgemini Engineering
- Singapore University of Technology and Design
- Juniper Networks with Vodaphone, Keysight, AirHop Communications and Rimedo as project partners
- Mavenir Systems Inc.
- Microsoft
- Northeastern University
- Radisys Corporation
- Telecom Infra Project (TIP)
The companies are being asked to demonstrate “viable RIC apps” (either near-real time xApps or non-real-time rApps) in several use-case categories, including energy savings, traffic steering and a “wild card” category that covers things such as cybersecurity, network slicing, quality of experience or spectrum management—the last of which is likely to be of keen interest as the federal government seeks more efficient and shared use of spectrum in order to satisfy commercial needs while still enabling DoD to maintain its missions.
There was so much interest in the RIC Forum that in addition to the 10 main presenters, NTIA/ITS and DoD ended up also making room for eight additional participants to give “lightning” presentations. Those eight presentations will be from Cohere Technologies; a joint presentation from Compal Electronics, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and Taiwan Mobile; Northeastern University and George Mason University; Novowi; the Open Networking Foundation (ONF); Rakuten Mobile USA; Rimedo Labs; and the University of California San Diego and Texas A&M University.
The RIC Forum will be held in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. In-person attendance is by invitation only, but the event will also be live-streamed. More information available here.
