Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (00:00):
We're going to move on to our first panel session. Now it's on the topic of enabling continuous innovation. The session is really going to be an update on OAN Alliance progress from five of the people involved in the working groups, either chairs or co-chairs, that kind of thing. So if I could ask the five speakers for this panel to come and take the stage Police wherever you are, come around this side and take your seat or straight up the front sit anywhere like peta. So when everyone takes their seat the way this is going to work, we're going to run through each speaker. They're going to have a chance to introduce themselves and send a few minutes updating you on the updating on progress in the area they're working on at the ORAN Alliance. Once we've been through the everybody on the panel, we'll then be taking questions and having some panel discussion. But just to start with the updates. So first of all, pet with you back to me, I'll come right around. Petr Ledl from Deutsche Telekom, you're going to talk, I think about progress on Open Front Hall. Your boss there has just teed you up quite nicely for that and a little bit on certification. So please go ahead.

Petr Ledl, Deutsche Telekom (01:16):
So good morning everybody also from my site, so great to see you here in the room and also welcome all on the remote access. So my name is Pedro. I am dealing with our ORAN network architecture technology choices we are making and of course it's a pleasure here to discuss with you update we are making in the ORAN Alliance in terms of open fronthaul and then also related certification and batches effort. So let's look a little bit back what we have achieved last year. So as you know, open front hall is one of the key interfaces that or alliance is specifying. It is giving an opportunity to decouple baseband radio unit and allow to make that multi-vendor system and traditionally open Fronthaul with the seven dash two split has been looking at all the aspect from user control, synchronization and airplane and there has been some concerns about some performance scenarios, especially for the advanced platforms like massive MO antennas and there have ever seen potential issues for some scenarios in uplink and therefore there has been a lot of efforts to address that.

(03:06):
This is what we call the uplink performance improvements and this is based on the MRS beamforming. So that specification was achieved last year and that's also a big milestone and contribution to make sure that the specifications are mature and allows commercial deployments with the performance system. So it's not only the specification itself for interoperability, it's important that we have also defined test cases for the conformance so that implemented devices can be tested if it was implemented according to the specifications. So that's one area specification itself and interoperability and performance. The other area that is of interest of community and that was addressed is to advanced features and capabilities in that interface. So two points to make here. So shared ORU is one of the scenarios that has quite some interest by the community. So this then is addressing scenarios like that one ORU is shared by multiple odu.

(04:31):
The other area that is of significant important for us also is the energy efficiency. So features related to the hibernate states or advanced sleep modes. So these scenarios were addressed and so these are just coupled to mention the open FRONTHAUL part. What is of course also important for the organization is to be able to provide frameworks for the environment to test interoperability conformance to a specification. So there were also a couple of updates there. So one limitation that was there for some time is that if companies implementing according to or specifications, they're not necessarily members of the OR alliance itself. So we removed the limitation that now vendor who is implementing according to ORAN specifications can get certificate and batch when it runs through the process. And of course this process is often executed by our OTIC labs and we are growing a number of members of the Otic labs every year.

(06:08):
So now in the recent board meeting we have approved two new OTs, one in the UK Digital Catapult, one in Brazil called CPBG if I'm not mistaken. So we have two new tics. So also very successful journey with our tics and creating environment where people can test compliance and provide certification. So this is what happened. And very quickly on some of our to-dos. So in terms of open fronthaul, there is a debate to provide IOT profile test configurations, convergence, which means that still the specifications allows a lot of optionalities. Here we speak about the set of delay values for the test configuration profiles. So we are very advanced in that there are some also new beamforming methods being discussed for CBO use. And when it comes to certification and batching, again as Abdu mentioned in the earlier keynote, security is critical in all areas we work in. So security assurance program here is referring to creating an environment where we can test against security requirements that are defined by a working group 11. And this is being advanced and discussed and also to improve sharing and collaboration between different tics, machine readable format for storing certificates, patches and test results we find important to increase efficiency and reuse of the work that was done in different open labs.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (08:10):
Thank you. Okay, good stuff. Thank you peta. One quick question we'll hand over to Ngoa. What's your confidence level that we see open Fronthaul massive IMO widely deployed let's say five years from now?

Petr Ledl, Deutsche Telekom (08:25):
No, I would be very confident. So you mean probably massive MIMO open of course this is the ultimate goal but we have seen this effort to be successful for the classical radios. We are seeing that being deployed commercially already and I think with all the advancements we were making a massive MIMO larger scale deployment, now within the timeframe of five years. I'm very confident that we will see.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (09:00):
Okay, fabulous. Great answer to be very confident with that. Nagendra from Rakuten Symphony please.

Nagendra Bykampadi, Rakuten Symphony (09:09):
Hi, good morning everyone and hello everyone who are viewing us online. So before I begin my presentation on the progress that we have made in work group 11, which I co-chair along with a few other of my colleagues, I want to just take a few minutes to explain what work Group 11 is all about and the kind of work that we do. So Work Group 11 is a group within ORAN Alliance which writes security specifications for the ORAN architecture. And the way we do it is we begin with identifying a list of assets. We identify attack vectors, we then identify threats to the asset and then we go through an elaborate process of risk assessment where we look at the impact likelihood of attack and then come up with the risk score. And this risk score is something which feeds into our security requirements and controls the security controls and security requirements go to a technical specification.

(10:17):
All the threats and the risk analysis goes into a separate TR or technical report. And those of you who are interested in following security work in or alliance, I strongly recommend that you not just look at the security specifications but also look at the amount of work that we have done with regard to threat analysis. I think it's humongous. The team has done a fan job and you'll see justification for every security requirement and control when you look at the threat analysis document. Now one of the main things about security work is that we keep updating our specifications as and when new threats come along and in 2024 you'll see the work that we have done for open Frontal, which is the third box from the top. Initially when we started doing security for open fronthaul, we began with TLS for M plane, then we went ahead and specified a 22.1 x for authentication and in the last year I'm happy to announce that we also have enough support for layer two security, which is max sec.

(11:22):
And not just that we also have a protection specification for explain messaging which is using I 1588. Now another activity that we do, which is complimentary to what I just explained is that as and when the architecture evolves, we come back and do the same thing which I mentioned earlier. We begin with threats, we begin with identifying assets and so on so forth. Towards that end, I think it's no surprise that AI ML has been a big topic. It sort of began in 22, 23 and then in 24 is really it took off in a big way and work group 11 didn't fall behind work. Group 11 did the complete threat analysis for adoption of AI ML in RAN. We looked at some detailed threat analysis and came up with security requirements and as we speak the November edition of the specification has the complete list of threats that we've identified for AI ML security.

(12:18):
Now it's also important that we look at deployment related security aspects as well. So for example, you have the ORAN system but you also need to build A PKI infrastructure and towards that we have a work item and work group level which is about automated certificate management support. Essentially what we're doing is for an ORAN system in order to enable certificate based authentication, what kind of specifications an operator needs to follow, a vendor needs to implement. That is what being discussed as part of automated certificate management support and a whole lot of things for a p security we did OAuth 2.0 access tokens and so on so forth. Now another important aspect here is, and this is something Peter touched upon in his previous talk as and when we write requirements and controls, we also write security tests to verify compliance to those specifications and that's the security test specification work that we do.

(13:17):
Now apart from the normal work that we do, which I just explained, we also kicked off three critical initiatives and I think our chairman talked about it as priorities for 2025 and I'm happy to see that all his priorities are actually something work Group 11 is working on how zero trust ready are we in terms of requirements and controls. So we have kicked off a work item in 24 where we are doing a gap analysis of our requirements gap analysis of our controls against a well-known framework and what is that framework that we're using? This is a framework from CSA cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency from US which has this beautiful document called zero trust maturity Model. And what we're now doing is ensuring that the security requirements and control at least as a baseline meet the initial maturity level that is prescribed as part of ZTMM.

(14:14):
Security assurance program is something which better also talked about. This is essentially a process by which a vendor can certify and obtain badging from ORAN Alliance. Extremely important. I'm sure operators and regulators in this room will be ecstatic to hear that. So we are now working on a security assurance program. Last but not the least, and David is going to talk about it, the adoption of open sources is increasing day by day. You have academia, you have researchers, you have people who are experimenting with oan, adopting our open source software and what does that mean? We need a process for them to raise vulnerability reports in there is any and that is what the CVD coordinated vulnerability disclosure process is all about. That kind of completes my talk. I just wanted to give you guys a quick recap of the extent of our security protocols that we use for the various protection mechanisms. Authentication, authorization, encryption. You see that we are covering the whole nine yards here and not just that for all the different varieties of assets that we have in our system, we use all these different mechanisms and this slide will be available for all of you to read at the end. And I think with that I just want to conclude my presentation. Thank you very much for listening to me.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (15:29):
Fabulous, thank you Nagendra. We're going to move right along to Chih-Lin I. Chih-Lin, please go ahead. Thank you Nagendra.

Chih-Lin I, China Mobile Research Institute (15:36):
Okay, thank you Gabriel. And unlike the vast work that our expert in security provides out of working group 11, my topic is AI intelligence and as you already heard from Abdu intelligence together with open and virtualization were the major theme from day one of Orion Alliance. And so the work that I'm going to share with you actually are the fruit, the labors of multiple working groups and focus groups and MVPC, a few other key committees under Orion Alliance. And this is kind of the overview of the progress as I said from day one 2018 when we launched around alliance with a baseline architecture. If you remember we had a hierarchical risks explicitly shown in the first version of the Orion Alliance architecture together with the key interfaces where a YE 2 0 1 0 2 and the XF R app hosted by the respective rigs. This is the very beginning of the foundation of bringing AI for run capability.

(17:04):
So as early as 2021, we already had R enabled traffic steering load balancing interference management, Q-O-S-Q-O-E and things like anon detection and prevention, et cetera. And then one step further a year later the work included additional rigging enabled capabilities and functions. Not only that, we also started using rain information, augmented optimization like local positioning, QOE optimization and some other R apps are augmented by rent information and in parallel service management orchestration SMOs work started which is the foundation of unified orchestration and management of not only the net functions but also the shared resources by both network function processing as well as by applications including ai, machine learning type of processing. The resources are shared efficiently in a coherent manner. On our O RAN platform, I mean O cloud specifically infrastructure that Abdu had shown you also in the keynote speech and last year we've completed our release zero four where on top of that we have service-based SMO and also explicitly stage three RAN analysis, information exposure, RAIE.

(19:01):
This lays the first foundation of RAN for ai, AKA AI on RAN. So all the baseline specs has been provided. Of course there is continuous enhancement and polishing and improvement that is taking place. As you can see that next year's plan, not this year's plan, actually our release five will build on top of that will provide a systematic coherent A ML model lifecycle management as well as data lifecycle management. In addition explicitly integrating computing and communication CCIN and also as I think Abdul also highlighted the decoupled SMO and also starting the intent management driven SMO.

(19:57):
Okay, a little bit of a highlight specifically on intelligence related specs last year because our release zero four concluded in July. But of course 2024 still has quite a few months after July. So here I'm trying to show you the up to date at least by the end of 2024. Our progress specifically related to intelligence spec where on decoupled SMO we have defined multiple foundational SMO services and also allow multi-vendor interop SMOS. That means we have open API accommodating third party services in our SMO and in addition we are working on the unified oh one and oh two so that multi-vendor EMS northbound could be aggregated into this coherent SMO platform. And you probably have heard many of the leading M os operators have started deploying such solutions as we are developing the specs still. And then on the non-real time rig front, a very important progress I had mentioned early on stages three R one APIs for the IML related to the data and model lifecycle management already and providing actually clear guidance for vendor implementation.

(21:44):
In addition stages three R one related test spec has started it's close to finishing and on the original between the interface a one between the two rigs A one there is also enhancement that now enables cross r co-training. As you probably remember, our original version was assuming most of the training is done in non real turn rig well as an area turn rig is mostly involving on inference only. But we have now evolved to allowing co-training across the two rigs and for the near real time rig the important interface for RAN analytic information exposure for third party applications. The interface is Y one are ready and also the exposure workflow is also ready to enable not only vendor provided, original vendor provided XFR app but also operator self developed in-house apps as well as any third party's apps can be easily ported onto the platform.

(23:05):
And of course with the exposure of the rent information which may include predicted throughput error rate, maybe buffer loading, et cetera, buffer occupancy, all of this, when you provide this information to third party application developers, it brings great opportunity to potentially new business opportunities to business values to operators and to the Apple providers as well. And also the E two interface is being enhanced to go further down, providing even lower layer multi-user MIMO optimization capability. And another important progress is in the meantime the earlier version of a one specs, six of them and also E two specs, three of them together. Nine intelligent related specs from Orion Alliance have been adopted in 2024 by Etsy as a Etsy spec and more.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (24:24):
I'm going to ask you to be very quick here, because...

Chih-Lin I, China Mobile Research Institute (24:25):
Okay this is just a glimpse of the, because we have a research group that started looking at six G era since more than two years ago. Some of their work related to intelligence includes further integration beyond communication computing but also AI and sensing capability for six G and also some preliminary work about digital twins. And there's another very important work we did in 2024 is the gap analysis of AI machine learning work in 3G PP and or run and preparing for the alignment work with CGVP and then you will have a special session on this topic later I think shortly after the break. So that's,

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (25:13):
This job is like 90% telling interesting people to stop talking. It's a crazy thing to do or Awn Muhammad at Rakuten you are up next. I'm starting me stopwatch, please go ahead. Thank you Chih-Lin.

Awn Muhammad, Rakuten Mobile (25:27):
Thank you. I hope I'm audible right So hello everyone, good morning. I'm on from Rakuten Mobile and I'm also a co-chair of SUFG, which is sustainability focus group. Before we get started and I explained to you the work we have done within OR alliance on energy savings, we believe that energy efficiency is not something of a strategic objective only, but it's really a necessity and for that reason within ORAN we are not only working on energy saving features but we want to develop a standardized future proof and scalable framework for all sustainability related work which is relevant to Orly. Having said that, I will give you some preview of what we have already achieved within Orly. So you can see that some of the most important features from the RAN perspective, so we have already standardized these features and the interesting thing about this is that for example, cell carrier shut down.

(26:46):
Now this feature looks very simplistic. We only turn off the carrier or a capacity cell, however within OR alliance thanks to the in near real time rig as well as non-real time R. So we can do this more intelligently using third party X apps and R apps and without compromising a user performance and analyzing the AI driven actions or the data. The second feature is also widely used in the industry but because we might have ORU from another vendor and DU from another. So it's important that we standardize all of this work. For example this RF channel reconfiguration. So when we don't have enough users or based on the capacity needs, we could turn off certain antenna elements or beams to save power and that also could be driven from the radio intelligent controller or Rick platform. And thirdly, the sleep modes or we call in or advanced sleep modes, it's really a complex feature and thanks to the companies who contributed, now we have a whole framework in place where we can intelligently put the radio unit to very short bursts of sleep based on how much user experience, I mean what kind of user experience we need to meet and based on the traffic scenario we can use maybe symbol based lot based or long-term sleep mode.

(28:40):
So this is also a key feature with an OR analyze that we have already standardized and can be driven from R platform. So I will then talk about quickly the work and we are currently undertaking within or analyze. So I know it's a bit boring and for some of you but we are doing more advanced features now. For example, three GPP has standardized a number of sustainability or energy saving related feature for RAN. So now we are analyzing how we could use our SMO and Rick platform to deploy these features more intelligently. So the work here is more on the intelligence path to drive this work through our apps or xep and from or perspective provide interoperability. And the second one you can rig driven radio specific advanced energy saving features. So here two are mentioned but there are probably more so one of them is right now we don't have a standardized framework on how we can ingest the data for example for the power sources so that the SMO or the non-real time brick can take more intelligent decisions.

(30:06):
So if it is already running on solar cells or wind power, then maybe it's okay we don't need energy saving actions. However if it has a limited battery or it's not running on renewable energy, then we can use the maximum energy saving mode based on user needs. And another area which is so I think a lot of most of you know that RAN is consumes the major part of energy consumption in a network within RAN we have radio and then within radio the most power hungry part of the radio is power amplifier, our power amplifiers. So we are now working like how within Aura Alliance we can study and then investigate and specify how to improve the power efficiency of the power amplifier. For that there is a power amplifier operating range and we want to optimize that again using R controls and the intelligent framework we have in place.

(31:15):
Thirdly, currently we are also studying the cloud part or cloud energy saving. Actually we have three technical reports and now a third version will be out with March release of the spec. So here we have studied a lot of methods, how we could intelligently scale the cloud networks and also turn off the nodes or change the CPU states who would take care of the control and what kind of data is required to provide such control. So this is all being studied and under investigation within or analyze. Okay. So apart from that I will quickly show you some other work which is maybe not direct related to energy saving features. So as sustainability is a key initiative within OR and alliance. So we are working on other sustainability aspects as well. So you can see we have a technical report on OR and hardware circularity which basically is a framework based on existing guidelines from ITU and NGMN as well as some other STOs. So now, but this is very specific to OR and hardware equipment circularity and what is required or what could be the ask from operator side. So there is a whole scoring mechanism provided specific to or then as I explained, we are also exploring cloud energy efficiency

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (32:55):
Rather than run through the whole detail of the slide. I invite you to wrap up the terrific slides but just so we can keep moving, let's push through. Sure, sure.

Awn Muhammad, Rakuten Mobile (33:03):
Let me quickly complete and then we have energy whole TR on energy measurement requirements. Also some other sustainability white papers that by the way discussed not only the software but hardware efficiency parts as well. And we also have NGRG related sustainability reports that work on more on the six G topic. And then we are also, by the way, we already have specifications on how to test rig driven energy saving within TIFG. So a lot of work going on related to sustainability in O RAN. That's a quick snapshot by the way. Thank you.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (33:41):
Fabulous. Thank you Awn. So we're going to move on to David Kinsey from at t and the O RAN software community I believe. David, please go ahead. The timer there, you can go a little over. We're going to stop just before the hour so you're good for now and whoever's doing the microphone please be ready.

David Kinsey, AT&T (33:56):
I'll be under. So I'm David Kinsey. I am the co-chair for the technical oversight committee for the O RAN source community. I also co-chair working group 10. Our problems in open source to date have been mostly around the copyright issues to use things in open source. We build them in the open and we publish them in the open to take data from the standards bodies and put that into our builds and then republish that sort of as a problem with copyright. So for the vast few years we've been trying to figure out how's the best way to solve that so that the standards bodies maintains the ownership of the standards, but the open source community can bring those in, do bug correction, modify them as needed for given release and actually make that happen. So RAN has started off this initiative for the standards collaboration copyright license, and this is exactly what it's intended to do.

(34:58):
It allows the SDOs to maintain their ownership over the copyright of code like files that are developed as part of the specification so we can incorporate it into open source. And this has been sort of a limiter on our ability to move quickly in the industry because we can do things like the standards but not exactly to the standards without having this copyright infringement. There's a link in there on the page that takes you to a presentation we did end of last year at Etsy. It goes into more detail about what that SECL is, but it's a key enabler for us to move forward. It allows us to actually ramp up and increase our velocity so we can move beyond just the notion of demonstrating the innovations of O RAN the capabilities and the architecture and things, but never actually trying for compliance.

(35:57):
So that means that now we have this task of what you see on the other side of the screen is that there is a large, it's not just the O RAN source community that's out there, there's a huge ecosystem of activities that's either directly within the scope of ORAN or just on the boundaries of it. We would interface, they RAN interfaces to some of these things. And so the notion is that now that we know that landscape and we have the mechanisms that we can follow the standards, can we navigate this? Can we organize all these teams so that they are traveling along with us on the same tracks, on the same timeline. And so we're doing some initial planning on a workshop, try and gather all the things, organize them and make them more focused because everybody's running on their own right now and that's been good for the demonstrative capability. But if we want real adoption, if we want accelerate adoption, what we need to do is get real things that companies can use as an actual building block. And to do that also then relies on a certain level of testing. And so we're also now initiating some work with the test integration focus group in order to actually start testing these pieces. So as we get them built in different communities, we have an assurance that they can actually start to integrate back in.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (37:24):
That's it, David. Fabulous. I watched last week, I think O-RAN Alliance had a next generation research group or some kind of online webinar I'd had a really terrific presentation on some of the open source initiatives as well. So that was a good compliment to that. Right. Do we have any audience questions? There's a fellow there with his hand up. Please share the microphones with you. If you could give your name and affiliation would be helpful as well.

Audience Question #1 (37:54):
Hi, this is Shiam. I just want to understand the role of ORAN in NTN. So far. ORAN is mainly focusing on terrestrial networks, but we haven't seen much work happening in the NTN area, especially when people are keeping talking about reason rate payloads R you only RU plus D or RUDC scenarios. Especially when RU and DU are separated by let's say LEO or media constellation and things, how we are ing the open front hall In those scenarios. That will be really helpful if we can share some thoughts.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (38:31):
Okay. Does anyone fancy it on? Please go ahead. That's coming up later as well. But on please.

Awn Muhammad, Rakuten Mobile (38:34):
Yeah, let me quickly, so ORAN have recently started work on NTN specification and the challenges that you mentioned is part of a new work item description where we are going to study impact on the frontal. And by the way, we are not only studying release 17 NTN, but we are also going to study and specify regenerative payload based NTN as well. So there are two separate work items approved in ORAN, but the work is recently started. So I believe you will see a lot of specifications coming in next year, this year and next year.

Chih-Lin I, China Mobile Research Institute (39:17):
Well specifically you can probably look forward to two deliverables shortly in this year. One is actually a study on the re enabled NTN use case requirements and key enabling technologies. And the other I think is a white paper that our industry engagement focus group will be publishing probably before June. So this would give you some understanding of where we are yet.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (39:58):
And a speaker in the final session has a little bit to say on NTN as well. Any other questions out there gentlemen here? Three row back.

Audience Question #2 (40:14):
Hi, my name is RAN and in your slide they shows lots about the R and I want to ask is that we know that R have two kind of apps, one is xap and the other is our apps, but not every company has the same preference about those two kind of rig. So I want to know what is your opinion or respect of this? Do you have any preference to develop those kind of apps? Yeah, thanks

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (40:51):
Chih-Lin I think maybe you should, do you want to go through that first?

Chih-Lin I, China Mobile Research Institute (40:55):
Good question. As you correctly already pointed out, our apps is associated with the non realtime rig, which operates in kind of above one minute type of timeframe. Whereas X app is hosted by a near real turn R, which is somewhere between it's above 10 millisecond, but around more like a hundred millisecond. Of course some logic you could expect that there may be a real time rig. But in terms of complexity and the challenge, it's increasingly harder as you can imagine. So at this point we didn't explicitly cover real time risk. Even though there is some associated work by our academic contributor members, they are proposing something called a DA. Now between our app and Xap, I think we fully expect that our app will take the lead will be mature and available broadly being adopted by both operators and the suppliers sooner than the rest. But we are still hopeful that Xap and near Rik will find its proper place in the six G era. That's the expectation. Okay. But of course this would all be part of very important alignment work we will have with 3G PP. We do want to make sure that all the good work do not go to waste, but we can in the meantime ensure a unified single 60 standards going forward. This will be very much in the middle of that alignment effort. Right.

Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading (42:48):
Okay. Fabulous. So with that, we're going to close the session. Please everybody join me and giving a round of applause to the panelists. Thank you very much.