O-RAN Alliance Global Plugfest validates Acceleran tech

The Accelleran-related test activities, which concerned the company’s dRAXTM 5G Centralised Unit (CU) and near real-time RAN intelligent controller (RIC), were conducted at the i14y Lab in Berlin, which acted as European Open Testing and Integration Centre (OTIC).

The first of the demonstrations focused on benchmarking the Accelleran dRAX CU component load and scalability. This was undertaken on two separate test beds, based on emulator equipment from Keysight Technologies and TeraVM O-CU Tester from VIAVI Solutions respectively. Using these testbeds, a number of load scenarios were experimented with – covering different User Equipment (UE), radio unit (RU) and distributed unit (DU) configurations. The work confirmed the interoperability of Accelleran CU in such scenarios – highlighting their ability to support different DU/RU/UE arrangements, as well as different prospective workloads, while using non-accelerated standard server hardware.

The second activity looked at the dRAXTM near real-time RIC, with a specific focus on O-RAN defined E2 interface. The test was conducted with VIAVI TeraVM O-RAN RIC Test, confirming that dRAX RIC E2 interoperability could be fully achieved. It also verified the ability of the accompanying xApps, developed using dRAX RIC SDK, to deal with data coming through this interface.

“These plugfest demonstrations clearly validate Accelleran’s ongoing contribution to the OpenRAN ecosystem and that we can live up to the industry’s expectations. It makes clear that our technology can work seamlessly with other vendors’ components via O-RAN specified interfaces.” states Arnaud Polster, CSO at Accelleran. “The demonstrations underline how we enable MNOs to gain differentiation via our software in the areas of standards-based RAN Intelligence, cloud-native CU scalability and hardware independence.”