With the move towards Open RANs, operators and integrators need to test that all the
Technology works together before it goes into the live network. Best scenario of this
challenge concerns the wide range of components being used by different vendors. How do
you deliver the best possible service when optimizing the configuration of the control plane?
Secondly Operators also need to see how this technology interacts with legacy 4G equipment
in the network, and how it responds to different UE environments.
Another major challenge is, once the technology has been deployed, when a problem arises
who solves it and how do you do this? With an Open RAN network, when a problem arises,
you must work with multiple vendors to resolve the issue. Who takes the responsibility to
resolve the issue when there are multiple vendors involved?
Performance perspective ORAN Challenges:
Below are the points to focus whenever an operator is adopting ORAN deployment to
overcome the challenges:
➢ Meeting the Key performance Indicator in a multi-vendor environment.
➢ E2E network performance.
➢ Keeping an eye on performance when large number of UE’s connected to network with different scenarios.
➢ Synchronization of fronthaul (O DU to O RU connection). Here Synchronization
plane plays an important role.
➢ PHY & MAC coordination: As we are now aware that O-RU contains some
functionalities of PHY layer which we call it as Low Phy.
So PHY-MAC coordination plays an important role to maintain the performance of ORAN.
To overcome the performance related challenges there are lots of use cases an operator can
execute and follow, below are some of them:
➢ Multi-Vendor Interoperability Test for:
❖ Resilience
❖ Robustness
❖ Reliability
❖ Functionality
❖ Performance
➢ System level Test
➢ protocol compliance tests for open interfaces and protocols
➢ Stability Testing
➢ Stress Testing
➢ Higher availability Testing.