Providers expand common understanding of Open RAN requirements

A second release of the Open RAN Technical Priorities as well as an Open RAN Security Whitepaper has been published under the MoU on Open RAN signed by Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange S.A., Telefónica S.A., TIM and Vodafone Group Plc.

The Open RAN Technical Priorities Release 2 is an update of the document published in June 2021. While Release 1 focused on the main scenarios and technical requirements for each of the building blocks of a multi-vendor RAN, Release 2 builds on those requirements and focuses in particular on intelligence, orchestration, transport and cloud infrastructure, aiming at defining a fully automated and interoperable Open RAN system.

A particular attention has also been drawn to the energy efficiency requirements and targets to support sustainable Open RAN deployments. It is expected that Open RAN networks will gradually become more energy efficient than traditional RAN, benefiting from Open RAN concepts such as cloudification, disaggregation and native AI.

The overall objective is to promote a fast pace for the development of competitive Open RAN solutions in Europe, across other regions and ultimately accelerate the global adoption of the technology. These requirements will evolve over time following the progress of Open RAN standardization and market development of Open RAN solutions.

The Open RAN Security White Paper is the result of the work carried out by the security experts of the Open RAN MoU signatories. This document starts with an introduction of the MoU framework and the O-RAN Alliance organization and activities. It focuses on all security aspects within O-RAN technology then, describing the risk-based threat modeling and remediation analysis conducted within the O-RAN Alliance for building an effective security O-RAN architecture as the basis first. After that, it provides details on the O-RAN Security Focus Group (SFG) activities, which focuses on developing the four security specifications that are the pillars of the O-RAN security architecture to cover threat modeling, security requirements, protocols and tests. The overall objective is to present all the security aspects considered while defining the Open RAN technology.

Both, the Open RAN Technical Priorities Release 2 and the Open RAN Security White Paper can be found on the web sites of the O-RAN Alliance and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).