PlugFests demo NEC’s MIMO O-RAN

Author: EIS Release Date: Jan 4, 2022

NEC says it has successfully demonstrated its O-RAN massive MIMO capabilities for the O-RAN ALLIANCE Global PlugFest 2021 at five of its venues, hosted by leading operators and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).

 

This year, NEC contributed as the first commercial provider of massive MIMO open Radio Units, resulting in NEC’s O-RU being integrated with O-CU, O- DU from O-RAN software vendors more than any other supplier. 

 

NEC and its subsidiary Netcracker also demonstrated their O-RAN Domain Orchestration solution (O-RAN SMO) and RAN software.

 

The companies participated in the following PlugFest venues:

 

 Menlo Park, USA This venue was hosted at the TIP Community Lab in Menlo Park (sponsored by Meta). NEC deployed its O-RU with Mavenir’s O-CU/DU for multi-vendor interoperability.

 

Torino, Italy Netcracker deployed its Open RAN Domain Orchestration solution, aligned with the O-RAN Service Management and Orchestration environment, at the Joint European O-RAN & TIP PlugFest venue hosted by European OTIC in TIM Innovation Lab – Torino. 5G RAN slice provisioning was validated using CU/DUs from Radisys based on the O1 interface. 

 

Tokyo, Japan Hosted by NTT DOCOMO, the operator and NEC succeeded in interoperability testing for 5G standalone (SA) built on 5G CU/DU and multi-vendor radio units (RUs). DOCOMO and NEC demonstrated the capability to migrate from a commercial 5G NSA into 5G SA through a software upgrade, using the same 5G CU/DU hardware. NEC also deployed its O-RUs in a lab hosted by Rakuten Mobile and successfully completed verification of open fronthaul interfaces and 3GPP RF conformance using Keysight Technologies’ test solution. 

 

Seoul, South Korea NEC contributed to the PlugFest venue hosted by LG UPlus in its 5G Innovation Lab in the LG Science Park, Seoul. NEC deployed O-RU in LG UPlus’s lab with O-CU/DU from Altiostar, a Rakuten Symphony company, fronthaul gateway from DZS and Intel processors and FlexRAN reference software. 

 

‘E2E Open RAN on 5G standalone mode’ was demonstrated using Keysight Technologies’ test solution. “The evolution of mobile networks to 5G standalone represents an opportunity for radio access networks to embrace an open and cloud- native architecture.