Background and Scope
The O-RAN Alliance was founded in 2018 as “a world-wide community of mobile operators, vendors, and research and academic institutions with the mission to re-shape Radio Access Networks to be more intelligent, open, virtualized and fully interoperable”. It was formed in part because many network operators were finding that the existing standards specification, for example from 3GPP and ETSI NFV ISG, were insufficient to obtain effective interoperability between systems from different network vendors. This was of particular concern in the radio access area which requires a high volume of equipment and represents a significant proportion of a mobile operator’s costs.
As a result, it has a different structure to most standards bodies, with considerable emphasis on testing and certifying implementations, as well as producing reference open-source implementations for functions which can be implemented in software.
Organisation and Working Methods
Reflecting its origins and objectives, the governance of the alliance makes a clear distinction between different categories of participating organisations. Full ‘membership’ is only open to network operators and the board is drawn solely from these members. Suppliers participate as ‘contributors’ and academic institutions are separately ‘academic contributors’.
Specifications are only one part of the O-RAN Alliance’s activity (and even these are often based on existing specifications). These specifications are directly linked with work on open-source software projects, test and validation, and certification to ensure that the specifications do satisfy the requirements of interoperability.
Each part of O-RAN has its own working methods. The specification process runs in a similar way to other standards bodies with working groups producing specifications for specific interfaces in the overall O-RAN architecture.
Documentation
O-RAN publishes their technical specifications as well as a wide variety of education and publicity material. Recently, some of its specifications have been adopted by ETSI, and are therefore ETSI specifications in their own right. The O-RAN Alliance is still relatively young and its impact in facilitating interoperability is still to be fully determined, but there is much industry focus on O-RAN’s work, not least because this is driven and supported by many global operators.
Accessing documentation
All O-RAN specifications, along with much education and publicity material, is available for free download. Working material is accessible only to members and contributors through a login to the Atlassian system.