By John (Jack) Murray, Jinri Huang & Su Gu.

On December 15, 2020 the O-RAN Software Community (OSC), working with the Linux Foundation, published its 3rd open software release within 18 months, dubbed “Cherry”.

The goal of the O-RAN Software Community is to advance the Radio Access Network (RAN) with a focus on open interfaces and embedded intelligence, followed by implementations that leverage new capabilities enabled by the O-RAN specifications.

Cherry release top contributors are AT&T, Nokia, Ericsson, Radisys, WindRiver, Highstreet Technologies, HCL Technologies and many more.

Cherry moves the O-RAN ecosystem closer to commercial deployments in mobile networks around the globe. On top of new functions aligned with the latest O-RAN specifications, such as the E2, A1 and O1 interfaces, this release also features significant advancements in the end-to-end integration of O-RAN Architecture components to meet the needs of early adopters. In addition, new software projects in the area of Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) have been initiated to drive the development of auto-configuration and management of O-RAN elements.

To access the Cherry release code, check out the O-RAN Software Community website

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Fig. 1: O-RAN Logical Architecture
FIG. 1: O-RAN LOGICAL ARCHITECTURE

Components of the OSC Cherry release
Use cases:

• Policy based Traffic Steering (Using A1 and E2) – for details, see a virtual demo at the O-RAN Virtual Exhibition

• Automated Monitoring and Health check of selected components (Using O1)

• Life Cycle Management Framework (LCM of rApp and xApp using SMO)

• O-DU Low and High pairwise testing (FAPI interface message test)

• Various simulators for testing and integration (E2, A1, OTF, etc.)

RICAPP

• Updated KPIMON xApp

• Traffic steering xApp dev continues

Near-RT RIC

• Automation of health check E2E call flow

• O1 mediator to handle restart gracefully

• E2Term and E2Manager: Adapt to E2 spec

• Extend A1 Mediator to expose Prometheus endpoint for publishing counters

Non-RT RIC

• ONAP architecture alignment for SMO/Non-RT RIC

• A1 enrichment information gathering

• R-APP platform API

ODU

• O-DU low – O-DU high pairwise testing

• O-DU / O-RU emulator pairwise testing

SIM

• E2 Simulator update

• UE level & Cell level KPIs generated for Traffic Steering

• KPI Data store for ML training

OAM

• Support for O1 interface compliance

INF

• Introduce high availability (HA) for O-Cloud deployment

SMO

• LCM Step 2 - Package Validation

• LCM Step 3 - Catalog Package

If you would like to learn more about the O-RAN Software Community or get involved please visit https://www.o-ran.org/software.

Thank you to all the contributors to the O-RAN Software Community and our Linux Foundation partner. We look forward to continued growth and success in creating and promoting the next generation of the Radio Access Network.