Evolution Toward the Next Generation Radio Access Network

Abstract

The O-RAN Alliance introduces a disaggregated Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture to drive flexibility, speed and innovation into 5G RAN deployments. To facilitate open implementations of this architecture the O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation have launched the O-RAN Software community focused on aligning a software reference implementation with the ORAN Alliance’s open architecture and specifications. The aim is to achieve a solution that can be utilized to unify and accelerate the evolution and deployment in the RAN. We briefly introduces the O-RAN Alliance, its architecture and key outcomes, as well as showcases its first open source implementation, Amber Release.