Theme 1: RIC enabled Advanced Sleep Modes
UK operating startups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Academia and software developers participating under Theme 1 will develop solutions for rApps and xApps to run on Non-Real Time and Near-Real Time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) platforms to improve energy savings in the Radio Access Network (RAN). The challenge focuses on leveraging Advanced Sleep Mode, a new feature identified by the Mobile Network Operators (MNO) community.
The goal of this Theme is to optimise the sleep mode patterns of the RAN through the utilisation of xApps and rApps. These applications receive real-time usage and load patterns from O-RAN network nodes through RIC, a platform that allows different software applications to work together with the radio network. xApps and rApps can use AI and ML techniques to evaluate, diagnose, and learn to improve the performance and resource utilisation of the radio network.
Digital Catapult will provide access to testing capabilities and a network setup for development and trials. The applications will be tested using a RIC tester which will simulate a real-world scenario of an Open RAN deployment, and the results will demonstrate how effectively they achieve energy efficiency gains.
In Theme 1, the testing will involve three sleep modes with different transition times:
- Micro sleep power state with instantaneous (i.e. per symbol basis) transition time.
- Light sleep power state with transition times between 6 ms and 640 ms.
- Deep sleep power state with transition times between 50 ms to 10 sec.
Participants will be provided with the opportunity to upskill application developers with highly transferable expertise to start or expand new value propositions in telecom and provide UK MNOs and private network providers with a pipeline of innovative and competitive suppliers and products to choose from.
Participating companies will receive a contribution of £30,000 per startup/SME developing xApp/rApp solutions on the programme.
Theme 2: Optimising CU/DU Power utilisation of server CPU cores
UK operating companies participating under Theme 2 will be expected to provide, deploy and integrate O-CU/O-DU software solutions within an energy monitoring and optimisation test platform. The goal of this Theme is to optimise O-DU and O-CU solutions for providing energy-efficient solutions to the MNOs and private network provider community.
Participating companies will explore innovative solutions and optimise their products' energy consumption using standardised testing methodologies. During this programme, Digital Catapult will provide access to an energy consumption monitoring test platform. Companies will be expected to deploy O-DU and O-CU software on a Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server and integrated with an O-RU and Core network simulator and a Power Analyser.
Participating companies offering either an O-DU and/or O-CU with a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7-9 will receive a contribution of £20,000 on the programme.
