Samsung Demonstrates Dynamic Scalability of 5G RAN Using ORAN Framework

In a broad collaborative industry effort, Samsung continues contributing to industry forums to advance open networks. Initiatives like Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project and ORAN (Open Radio Access Network) alliance are bringing together network, cloud, and technology providers to drive open standards-driven architectures and implementation platforms. These new open platforms allow operators to seamlessly manage the lifecycle of multi-vendor hardware and software solutions to deliver network services.

As a contributing member to ORAN, Samsung recently leveraged the open standardized architecture to demonstrate how individual software modules that comprise a virtual network function of a 5G radio access network (RAN) can be orchestrated by an ONAP management platform.

Using the orchestration and automation platform defined by ONAP, Samsung demonstrated the automated monitoring and scaling of a virtual network function of a 5G radio access network (RAN) that complies with the ORAN-defined open architecture.

The platform incorporates a closed control loop process to manage and respond in real-time to actionable events presented by the network. The modular architecture includes a set of open northbound APIs that facilitate inter-vendor integration and interoperability. This closed loop approach enables real-time tracking of events and scenarios ranging from those that will self-recover to others that require action, like scaling of resources to accommodate demand variations.

Defined in ORAN specifications, the O1 interface between the radio access network components and the ONAP management platform provides a set of standardized management capabilities using open northbound RESTful APIs for O-RAN components, like the CU, DU, and RU.

The automated closed loop monitoring uses three steps:

Samsung demonstrates compliance to the O1 interface and leverages ONAP framework to auto-scale its RAN functions. In this demonstration, when Samsung’s Virtualized Centralized Unit (vCU) reaches the designated threshold, the vCU generates an event indicating the system is approaching high capacity levels. Upon receiving the alert and confirming the appropriate policies for call processing, the ONAP Management Platform’s Service Orchestrator indicates to the vCU to create a new instance of the call processing component (CPC) to support more system capacity.

In today’s systems, adding capacity requires manual intervention by the operations staff, and in some cases new hardware installation. With this recent demonstration, Samsung illustrates how automation can activate additional capacity by instantiating necessary resources and functions such as CPC, which manages RRC (Radio Resource Control), RRM (Radio Resource Management), and PDCP-C (Packet Data Convergence Protocol) in real time. 

This milestone is significant as it demonstrates how the ORAN architecture can enable multi-vendor RAN components to scale and manage the network and its resources effectively. The open interfaces provide network operators with the opportunity to design and develop their network with best-in-class solutions that interoperate. This capability is a significant step toward providing network operators with a more flexible radio access network that could be more cost-efficient to deploy and operate. The 5G vision to offer a wide variety of applications will require an automated and highly flexible RAN, and Samsung is excited to demonstrate how the 5G ecosystem can achieve this vision.