NEC and Fujitsu have begun developing technologies for interoperability testing between 5G base station equipment conforming to O-RAN specifications at NEC's U.K. laboratories and Fujitsu's U.S. laboratories.
This initiative will be implemented as part of the 'Post 5G Infrastructure Enhancement R&D Project' under the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) of Japan. Both companies are scheduled to build a verification environment using these technologies in their respective laboratories from August of this year and will begin interoperability testing. Leveraging this verification environment offers the potential to significantly streamline interoperability verification between base station equipment from different vendors.
Through this initiative, NEC, Fujitsu, and NEDO will accelerate the global reach of base station equipment that conforms to O-RAN specifications and contribute to stimulating growth and innovation in the open 5G market.
In recent years, base station equipment has become more open due to O-RAN fronthaul interface specifications formulated by the O-RAN Alliance, and it is becoming possible to connect to RUs (radio units) and CUs / DUs (central units / distributed units) from a variety of vendors. However, in order to quickly verify interoperability between different vendors' equipment, it is necessary to establish a verification process, develop tools that can be used in common, and to develop a verification environment.
NEC and Fujitsu have begun developing technologies to verify base station equipment interoperability at their respective facilities in the U.K and the U.S. NEC is conducting trials at its Open RAN laboratory in NEC Europe, London, U.K., while Fujitsu is doing so at its laboratory hosted at Fujitsu Network Communications.
