Viavi Solutions this week announced extensions to its Open RAN test suite to enable the industry to address challenges of maximizing development productivity and speed to market.
The company’s portfolio of end-to-end test and assurance solutions for Open RAN – augmented by partnerships with leading vendors –can be deployed on premise, in the cloud or as a service.
As Open RAN moves from the lab to the field, challenges of deploying any new technology are compounded by the need to support legacy networks. While greenfield operators are less concerned about this issue and are quicker to adopt cloud-native architectures, incumbents must balance the needs of significant subscriber and revenue bases. The resulting operator landscape requires vendors to configure solutions to address multiple generations of radio technology, bridging traditional infrastructure and the cloud, and integrating with incumbent equipment providers.
To address the accelerating pace of Open RAN adoption, VIAVI is introducing several enhancements to its industry-leading portfolio of end-to-end test and assurance solutions:
· RIC Test.TeraVM RIC Test validates the performance of the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) when presented with a wide range of RAN scenarios, tests the functionality of rApps and xApps, and provides the means to generate the data needed to train AI models.
· Test in the Cloud. VIAVI allows any node – O-RU, O-DU, O-CU, RIC and Core – and complete end-to-end testing to be performed in public, private and edge cloud environments.
· Test as a Service. VIAVI now provides a Test as a Service (TaaS), offering the support to maximize your engineering productivity and provide access to the right tools and expertise to enable the rapid delivery of high performance and ultra-reliable cellular communications products.
· TMLite. The capabilities of the flagship TM500 Network Tester are now available in a streamlined version on a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server, enabling vendors to deploy focused functional test tools earlier in the development cycle, and allow smaller vendors to gain access to the TM500 family with a more compact package. The TMLite is built around the latest third-generation AMD EPYC processors which offer high compute and input/output flexibility per server, enabling multiple carriers of 4G and 5G at RF and Open Fronthaul.
Sameh Yamany, Chief Technology Officer, VIAVI
Open RAN is moving out of the lab into the real world, facing the messy complexities of mapping theoretically sound technologies and architectures to a wide diversity of implementation scenarios. VIAVI has harnessed its decades of leadership in test tools for cellular and virtual networks, our critical role in industry organizations such as the O-RAN ALLIANCE, and our relationships with other major vendors to ensure our customers have access to tailored and best-of-breed solutions.
