The big wireless carriers and5Gequipment vendors are working together on standards to promote better interoperability among the gear needed to provide the high-speed wireless service.
The ORAN (stands for open radio access networks) Alliance, founded in Germany in 2018, is working on open software interfaces between the different layers of the carrier-equipment stack to give providers more flexibility as they roll out 5G services that include support for物联网和ultra-low-latency applications. The group has more than 200 members ranging from carriers, to hardware and software vendors of all stripes.
目前运营商系统的标准是高度特定于供应商的、封闭的、垂直集成的。把自己的设备和本站的设备销售到本站，也就是说把本站的设备和本站的设备连接起来。这种设备往往不能很好地与其他供应商的设备配合使用，因此，出于成本或能力的考虑，希望在堆栈的某个部分使用不同供应商的设备的运营商可能会被锁定在其主要供应商中。2020欧洲杯预赛
ORAN正试图通过在每个级别创建开放标准来改变这种状况，以支持多供应商网络和白盒设备的使用。这种互操作性是5G时代的关键，5G时代将具有更广泛的无线能力和更密集的设备部署。
罗格斯大学实验系统和原型办公室副主任伊万·塞斯卡（Ivan Seskar）说，事实上，5G正推动着许可无线设备世界向更开放的方向发展。
“Hardware’s less and less important because more and more functions are implemented in software,” he said. “Once you have that, you’re trying to make sure that this software is somewhat standardized. If you really look at the technological drivers, it’s the need for customized deployments of communications systems.”
A simple form of 5G customization might be frequency slicing, for example, at a major sporting event in a specific area. A provider might want to devote specific frequency resources to keeping high-quality video moving and leave the rest available for other traffic. Right now, that would require the carrier’s equipment vendor to figure out how to enable it, according to Seskar. But frequency slicing an ORAN standard. So, if it were available at the software level, and the network provider was using ORAN-compliant equipment, the capability could be quickly added on the fly.
“If it’s all open and public, I can hire two guys in New Jersey who can write me a plugin to manage a set of base stations,” said Seskar.
The concept is similar to what happened to the computing industry about 20 years ago, according to Manu Gosain, senior technical program director at Northeastern University. Where there used to be heavily integrated vendor stacks, data centers and networking and most other major facets of IT now communicate using agreed-upon standards.
“The majority of the cloud world works on open source,” he said. “Anything that’s new gets thrown out into the ecosystem, they develop a community, the community develops back, and that’s what helps scale and harden those technologies.”
Traditional base station units, Gosain added, are essentially dumb antennas. Part of the idea with ORAN is to take some of the major advancements in networking technology, most notably under the umbrella of 5G, and move that intelligence out to the radio front-end.
It’s a win-win even for the equipment vendors, who profit from vertical integration but who, with open-source interfaces, can make their money back in other ways, according to Ashutosh Dutta, program chair of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
“The vendor community, although they’re losing market on the hardware side, they’re gaining it in software,” he said. “I can still buy a piece of Nokia software and another piece from Ericsson and they’ll interoperate because they’re following an ORAN standard.”
作为一套标准，ORAN在很大程度上仍在进行中。在罗莱姆市和美国大陆的其他地方，已经有三个测试平台在美国和美国的盐湖城进行了测试。
戈萨因说：“公司在这里是因为他们看到了机会。
ORAN members include carriers AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, BT, Vodafone, Orange and China Mobile. Hardware and software vendors that are members include Analog Devices, Arm, Broadcom, Ciena, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Fujutsu, IBM, Intel, Juniper, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nokia, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Red Hat, Samsung and VMware.