Project ARIANE (Accelerating RAN Intelligence across Network Ecosystems) is proud to be one of the Department of Science Innovation & Technology (DSIT) Open Networks Ecosystem (ONE) competition winners with an objective to further the UK cause for RAN Intelligence and software development. Accelerating RAN Intelligence across Networks Ecosystems or ARIANE includes 9 partners: TIP, Accenture UK, Amdocs UK Limited, Arqit UK, BT Group plc, HCL Technologies, Net Reply UK, Viavi Solutions UK and VMWare UK, and will be supported by Adtran.
In the past 4 years, the movement towards open and disaggregated networks started, thanks to initiatives led by Open-Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) ALLIANCE, Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Open RAN along with Mobile Network Operator (MNOs) and other vendor industry forums. Although there is increased market choice in hardware elements of an Open RAN, the software elements are still maturing. One key element of the O-RAN ALLIANCE architecture is the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), which allows interoperable and portable Software applications to interface into the Radio Network, and through the use of AI/ML techniques to assess, diagnose, and learn how to optimise performance and resource utilisation of radio network elements. The benefit to the MNOs, in the future, is the ability to dynamically adapt the use of radio access at site, whilst optimising use of spectrum, being more energy efficient, and improving upon coverage and capacity to suit fluctuations in customer demand.
The consortium will conduct carrier grade simulated testing of 3 DSIT highlighted xAPPs/rAPP use cases over multiple RIC platforms – energy reduction, advanced traffic steering, and dynamic Quality of Service (QoS) based resource allocation. As well as testing these use cases under various test conditions, ARIANE partners will be using resources & tools, to investigate, validate, and report insights into the specific challenge areas that are impacting standards development and market development today.
After 18 months, the project hopes the outputs will help to stimulate more operator trust in RIC applications for real-world RAN deployments, to foster further RIC and application development, and to improve standards definition in interface design, API flows and security-by-design.
The consortium will be present at FYUZ, TIP’s flagship event. To learn more and register for the event, please visit: https://www.fyuz.events/