Open Networking Foundation (ONF)on Tuesday announced the formation of the SD-RAN project (Software Defined Radio Access Network) to pursue the creation of open source software platforms and multi-vendor solutions for mobile 4G and 5G RAN deployments.
Initially, the project will focus on building an open source Near Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller (nRT-RIC) compatible with the O-RAN architecture.
The new SD-RAN project is backed by a consortium of leading operators and aligned technology companies and organizations that together are committed to creating a truly open RAN ecosystem. Founding members include AT&T, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Intel, NTT, Radisys and Sercomm.
ONF has a track record of building open source platforms deployed in tier-1 operator networks worldwide. ONF's cloud-native solutions all leverage disaggregation and whitebox hardware, utilizing SDN, NFV and the latest cloud technologies to build flexible, performant, highly available solutions where intelligence and control is moved from proprietary vendor specific devices up into the cloud.
To date, the ONF has addressed a wide array of operator use cases, including: data center, fixed access, backhaul, optical transport and the mobile core domains. Mobile RAN is one of the most challenging use cases, and it has yet to benefit from disaggregation, multi-vendor interoperability and SDN-ization. Now that the industry is aligning behind the open architecture and interfaces specified by the O-RAN ALLIANCE, the SD-RAN community has formed to help bring the full benefits of ONF's unique approach to the RAN domain.
SD-RAN will follow O-RAN specifications as they are developed and will also make use of components of existing open source to facilitate interoperability.
