O-RAN ALLIANCE Summit - Accelerating Open RAN Adoption
img
img
img
img

About us

About O-RAN ALLIANCE

O-RAN ALLIANCE has been founded in February 2018 by AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO and Orange. It has been established as a German entity in August 2018.

Since then, O-RAN ALLIANCE has become a world-wide community of mobile network operators, vendors, and research & academic institutions operating in the Radio Access Network (RAN) industry.

O-RAN ALLIANCE’s mission is to re-shape the RAN industry towards more intelligent, open, virtualized and fully interoperable mobile networks. O-RAN specifications enable a more competitive and vibrant RAN supplier ecosystem with faster innovation to improve user experience. O-RAN based mobile networks improve the efficiency of RAN deployments as well as operations by the mobile operators.

O-RAN ALLIANCE operates in compliance with WTO principles for the development of international standards, guides and recommendations: transparency, openness, impartiality and consensus, effectiveness and relevance, coherence, and addressing the concerns of developing countries. Learn more in our white paper.

To achieve its mission, O-RAN ALLIANCE
is active in 3 main streams:

Specification effort

Extending RAN standards towards openness and intelligence

O-RAN Software Community

Development of open software for the RAN (in cooperation with the Linux Foundation)

Testing, Integration and Certification

Supports for Members and Contributors in testing, integration and certification of their
O-RAN implementations

O-RAN ALLIANCE’s Governing Bodies

General Meetings (GM)

O-RAN Members (i.e. mobile network operators) have the right to attend and vote at the GMs. Annual GM takes place usually once per year to review O-RAN’s performance, decide on key topics and (once every 2 years) elect the Board of Directors. There can be Extraordinary GMs in addition.

Board of Directors (Board)

The Board is consisting of up to 15 Members. There are 5 founding Members and up to 10 elected Members. Founding Members keep their positions in the Board whereas the elections of the elected Board Members take place every 2nd year from the alliance’s setup.

The Board members are:

img

AT&T

Founding Member
Igal Elbaz
img

Bharti Airtel

Elected Member
Randeep Singh Sekhon
img

China Mobile

Founding Member
Huang Yuhong
img

Deutsche Telekom

Founding Member
Alex Jinsung Choi
img

DISH Network

Elected Member
Siddhartha Chenumolu
img

KDDI

Elected Member
Tatsuo Sato
img

NTT DOCOMO

Founding Member
Takaaki Sato
img

Orange

Founding Member
Claire Chauvin
img

Rakuten Mobile

Elected Member
Sharad Sriwastawa
img

Reliance Jio

Elected Member
Mathew Oommen
img

Singtel

Elected Member
Si Cheng Choon
img

Telefonica

Elected Member
Enrique Blanco
img

TIM

Elected Member
Daniele Franceschini
img

Verizon

Elected Member
Steven Rice
img

Vodafone

Elected Member
Nadia Benabdallah

Executive Committee (EC)

The EC supports the Board by proposing agendas, priorities, projects, and releases for the Board to consider and approve. In addition, the EC may be asked to make recommendations to the Board to overcome any ties. The EC consists of representatives of the 5 O-RAN founding members and two elected representatives from the Board members.

Technical Steering Committee (TSC)

TSC decides or gives guidance on O-RAN technical topics and approves O-RAN specifications prior to the Board approval and publication. The TSC consists of Member representatives as well as the Work Group and Focus Group co-chairs, representing both Members and Contributors. The TSC is co-chaired by:

O-RAN Technical Work Groups

The O-RAN specification work has been divided into technical Work Groups (WG), all of them under the supervision of the Technical Steering Committee. Each of the WGs covers a part of the O-RAN Architecture. All WGs are open to all Members and Contributors.

  • WG1: Use Cases and Overall Architecture Work Group

    It has overall responsibility for the O-RAN Architecture and Use Cases.  WG 1 identifies tasks to be completed within the scope of the Architecture and Use Cases and assigns Task Group leads to drive these tasks to completion while working across other O-RAN Work Groups.

  • WG2: The Non-Real-Time RAN Intelligent
    Controller and A1 Interface Work Group

    The primary goal of Non-RT RIC is to support Non-Real-Time intelligent radio resource management, higher layer procedure optimization, policy optimization in RAN, and providing AI/ML models to Near-RT RIC.

  • WG3: The Near-Real-Time RIC
    and E2 Interface Work Group

    The focus of this WG is to define an architecture based on Near-Real-Time Radio Intelligent Controller (Near-RT RIC), which enables near-real-time control and optimization of RAN elements and resources via fine-grained data collection and actions over E2 interface.

  • WG4: The Open Fronthaul Interfaces Work Group

    The objective of this WG is to deliver truly open fronthaul interfaces, in which multi-vendor DU-RRU interoperability can be realized.

  • WG5: The Open F1/W1/E1/X2/Xn Interface Work Group

    The objective of this WG is to provide fully operable multi-vendor profile specifications (which shall be compliant with 3GPP specification) for F1/W1/E1/X2/Xn interfaces and in some cases will propose 3GPP specification enhancements.

  • WG6: The Cloudification and Orchestration Work Group

    The cloudification and orchestration WG seeks to drive the decoupling of RAN software from the underlying hardware platforms and to produce technology and reference designs that would allow commodity hardware platforms to be leveraged for all parts of a RAN deployment including the CU and the DU.

  • WG7: The White-box Hardware Work Group

    The promotion of open reference design hardware is a potential way to reduce the cost of 5G deployment that will benefit both the operators and vendors. The objective of this Work Group is to specify and release a complete reference design to foster a decoupled software and hardware platform.

  • WG8: Stack Reference Design Work Group

    The aim of this WG is to develop the software architecture, design, and release plan for the O-RAN Central Unit (O-CU) and O-RAN Distributed Unit (O-DU) based on O-RAN and 3GPP specifications for the NR protocol stack.

  • WG9: Open X-haul Transport Work Group

    This WG focuses on the transport domain, consisting of transport equipment, physical media and control/management protocols associated with the transport network.

  • WG10: OAM Work Group

    This WG is responsible for the OAM requirements, OAM architecture and the O1 interface.

  • WG11: Security Work Group

    This WG focuses on security aspects of the open RAN ecosystem.

O-RAN Focus Groups and Research Groups

Focus Groups deal with topics that are over-arching the technical Work Groups or are relevant for the whole organization.

img
  • SDFG: Standard Development Focus Group

    SDFG plays the leading role on working out the standardization strategies of O-RAN ALLIANCE and is the main interface to other Standard Development Organizations (SDOs) that are relevant for O-RAN work, for which SDFG also coordinates incoming and outgoing Liaison Statements.

  • IEFG: Industry Engagement Focus Group

    IEFG focuses on proactive industry and O-RAN Ecosystem engagement to promote and accelerate O-RAN based technology adoption, proliferation and continuous innovation.

  • OSFG: Open Source Focus Group

    OSFG deals with open source-related issues for O-RAN ALLIANCE. Its responsibility includes planning, preparation, and establishment of an O-RAN Software Community (OSC), development of open source-related strategy, coordination with other open source communities, and more.

  • TIFG: Testing and Integration Focus Group

    TIFG defines O-RAN’s overall approach for testing and integration, including coordination of test specifications across various WGs. This may include creating end-to-end test & integration specifications; profiles to facilitate O-RAN productization, operationalization and commercialization; approaches to meet general requirements; and specifications of processes for performing integration and solution verification. The TIFG plans and coordinates the O-RAN ALLIANCE PlugFests and sets guidelines for the 3rd party Open Testing and Integration Centres (OTIC).

  • SuFG: Sustainability Focus Group

    SuFG focus is to optimize energy consumption, reduce environmental impact, and create more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly mobile networks.

  • nGRG: next Generation Research Group

    The nGRG focuses on research of open and intelligent RAN principles in 6G and future network standards.

img

Logo type description and guidelines
with downloadable logos

Download O-RAN brand manual