Validation of Current O-RAN Technologies and Insights on the Future Evolution

Entering the 5G era, the mobile network operators (MNO) are facing greater challenges in providing services cost effectively than any other previous generations. The potential solutions to this are lying on the emerging trend of deep convergence of information technology (IT), communication technology (CT) and data technology (DT). In particular, the O-RAN technology, the representation of such ICDT convergence and proposed by the O-RAN ALLIANCE in 2018, is transforming Radio Access Networks towards a new paradigm featuring openness, cloudification and intelligence. O-RAN has gained huge attention from both industry and academia since its inception. In this paper, we presented the recent endeavors from China Mobile, including our deployment scenarios, various test results from open fronthaul, cloud platform to the intelligent controller. Our rich and comprehensive tests have demonstrated the viability and superiority of current O-RAN technologies. Furthermore, we also provide our deep thinking on the O-RAN future evolution in order to better serve the emerging applications such as Metaverse, cloud extended-reality (XR), extensive enterprise private 5G verticals and so on.