Rakuten Mobile has joined forces with two of its many suppliers – RAN software vendor Altiostar and 5G radio provider NEC – to demonstrate interoperability in a multivendor O-RAN 5G network with Massive MIMO antenna arrays.
Altiostar integrated the O-RAN distributed unit (O-DU) functionality of its vRAN with NEC’s O-RAN Radio Unit (O-RU) using control, user, synchronization and management plane protocols based on O-RAN Alliance guidelines. The 5G layer was built using container network functions (CNFs) running on the same cloud infrastructure that Rakuten has deployed to support its live 4G network.
As part of the management-plane integration, Altiostar adopted a hierarchical model that allows the O-DU software to manage the NEC radio unit, including software updates, radio unit configuration, fault management and performance monitoring. This was demonstrated using 5G NR in sub-6 GHz spectrum with Massive MIMO, conforming to all 3GPP’s downlink/uplink (DL/UL) requirements.
“Open RAN as a concept is one that the whole industry is now actively pursuing as a means to introduce supply chain diversity into mobile networks globally,” said Ashraf Dahod, Altiostar’s CEO.
Rakuten’s CTO, Tareq Amin, said: “Rakuten Mobile is a big supporter of O-RAN principles and has seen the benefit of supply chain diversity in our own network. By combining the spectral efficiency of Massive MIMO along with an advanced cloud-based RAN, we are leveraging and introducing advanced innovative technology from both NEC and Altiostar, who are specialists in these respective fields.”