Report
Executive summary
The Aura project has met the vast majority of its goals:
A low-power Active Antenna Unit (AAU) and a high-power AAU were designed in the UK, and prototype runs of each have been successfully tested and are currently under evaluation with several Customers, one of which is BT.
The AAU designs have been shown to draw less than 70% (and in some cases less than 50%) of the currently deployed offerings, with the same throughput and illumination levels. This makes an outstanding case for a ‘strip and replace’ approach to existing equipment.
The AAUs have been designed in a modular way so that variants using different bands or output power levels are easier to produce.
Several additional hardware engineers have been employed at Parallel Wireless and have a full forward-looking workload designing platform variants for global MNOs.
This document is a closure report for the Aura project, executed under the UK DCMS/DSIT open network ecosystem (ONE) program. In this report we provide an overview of the project’s design and operational elements, as well as an assessment of the project’s success against its objectives and intended benefits, which were summarised in the project’s application form:
Project AURA (Agile Universal Radio Architecture) will develop a cost reduced, energy efficient and flexible Open RAN radio Unit (O-RU) product range based on modular architecture. The AURA O-RUs will be developed with an emphasis on flexibility to target different frequency bands and form factors. With configuration requirements being provided by Parallel Wireless’ Program Line Management as well as BT, and with input from Real Wireless based on a review of target deployment scenarios, the focus is on manufacturability for real world 2G/4G/5G commercial deployments.
