The Open Centralized Unit Distributed Unit (OCUDU) Ecosystem Foundation challenges AI-RAN gatekeeping that has been stalling the open RAN movement
Opinions on open RAN (radio access network) are mixed. On the surface, the movement looks less alive now than it did 8 years ago.
So far, adoption has remained concentrated to a handful of providers like, AT&T, Orange and Vodafone. The supplier diversity that it promised never quite came to pass. Ericsson and Nokia still remain the primary suppliers in the ecosystem, and according to Dell’Oro Group, things are not likely to look up in the future. The market research firm predicted multi-vendor RAN to account for less than 5% of the total RAN deployments by 2030.
With all that, it looked like the movement had lost its thunder for a bit, but conversations are reopening once again. Right before MWC, the Linux Foundation formed the Open Centralized Unit Distributed Unit (OCUDU) Ecosystem Foundation, an initiative to build, scale, and sustain the OCUDU Project assets and establish a reference architecture for RAN.
OCUDU represents a strategic effort to keep the open RAN technology evolving. It aims to create an open transparent foundation built on open-source code on which innovation and integration can happen much faster. Crucially, it focuses on enhancing two central computing components of the open RAN technology: Distributed Unit (DU) and Central Unit (CU), without solely depending on Nvidia’s stack.
Built on the lessons and successes of open RAN, OCUDU is a fully software-defined stack that can be deployed across multiple hardware platforms, whether that’s for 5G or 6G in the future, unlocking an array of new use cases with AI integration.
The initiative is backed by the U.S. Department of War (DoW) whose goal is to build an open-source CU/DU software stack for 5G and 6G RAN that breaks vendor lock-ins and accelerates multi-vendor deployments, while keeping the supply chain domestic.
“It’s been a long time coming for us,” said Thomas Rondeau, principal director, FutureG Department of War, in an interview with RCR Wireless News. “We’ve been working on this for a while, understanding the need for opening up the RAN stack.”
Rondeau explained the driver behind the shift towards open source at this point. “This is a trend that we see in technology all the time. As soon as…the processing and compute power become advanced enough and the infrastructure is commoditized, it’s the right time to grow into an open-source stack because I didn’t want everybody to kind of just keep putting their resources into building their own version of O-RAN, carrying their own code around…there was just so much churn and resource being used for that.”
From a business perspective, the move to open source is a no-brainer. “In my opinion, you should focus on keeping the proprietary code, the thing that is a business differentiator for you…and then the rest of it is just architecture that you’re sitting on top of. Why spend your resources handling that when everybody could?”
OCUDU has the potential to introduce optionality and build a true multi-vendor RAN ecosystem that O-RAN was designed to deliver in the first place. “It’s like everybody had their own operating system and then Linux came along and said, ‘Hey, we can solve all this for the infrastructure of what became the internet.’ We wanted to have that same kind of transformation here.”
The Linux Foundation and DoW are joined in their initiative by leading vendors, like AMD, DeepSign, Nokia, Ericsson, Nvidia, Softbank, SRS and AT&T. “It’s pretty incredible how people really kind of jumped on this and how fast they jumped on it, “ Rondeau said. “Everybody seems to want something like this.”
For now, OCUDU is funded by the government. “We have three years of runway for government funding of this and at the end of three years, they have to be commercially successful.” By which time, it should be able to pay for itself and sustain the codebase.
OCUDU is already available on GitHub for anybody savvy enough to try their hand at it, with v1 set to drop in April. New versions will be released at a half-yearly cadence, Rondeau told.
“The development of the code will be done in an open-source fashion. So you’ll see the code being developed on GitHub, regularly updated as it’s going, but then we’ll kind of snap the chalk line and say this is version two, version three or however they version it.”
However, while partners like SRS and DeepSig provide the core team of coders for OCUDU, Rondeau reminded that it is a public-private initiative that requires the full support of the community.
“We can’t do this alone…. you can’t rely on an open-source project if you just have a concentrated set of developers. You need more. We need to grow that as quickly as possible. So [we] really urge everybody — especially anybody who’s been successful in open RAN — to really take advantage of this as a next iteration to build on top of that and help us create that community, build ecosystem, and build commercial success.”
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