Putting O-RAN to the Test

At Spirent, we believe testing is critical for scaling Open RAN (O-RAN). It provides a number of benefits and opportunities that weren't there with proprietary networks. It also forces the test and measurement vendors and assurance vendors to evolve their approaches to solve this problem.

We will begin by looking at the O-RAN architecture and will talk about the benefits of O-RAN, including flexibility, ecosystem, and multi-vendor interoperability. We will also take a quick look at the topologies that might be deployed. By looking at the service and orchestration framework, you will see that the Centralized Unit (CU) splits between the control plane and the user plane, and maybe you have multiple to use attached to a CU, and then you might have multiple Radio Units (RU) attached to a Distributed Unit (DU). Then, you even have the opportunity to combine 4G and 5G together. This might look complex, but the way to approach this problem is to break it down into its fundamental elements.