Interview with Ganesh Shenbagaraman, Head of Standards and Ecosystems, Radisys Corporation
The telecommunications industry is currently seeing good momentum in the adoption and deployment of Open RAN. recently, RCR Wireless News We spoke to Ganesh Shenbagaraman, Head of Standards and Ecosystems at Radisys, about upcoming open RAN initiatives and what he believes in the future momentum of 5G and 6G.
“We see forward momentum and real examples of progress in Open RAN,” he explained in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “We have the O-RAN Alliance. [and] We have multiple vendor consortiums and we can see interoperability starting to come into play. Networks like DISH, which is multi-vendor and currently in operation, are a great example of how things work with Open RAN. ”
However, Shenbagaraman emphasized that much work still needs to be done to accelerate O-RAN deployment. “Open RAN is not yet a plug-and-play story,” he said. “While the Open RAN standard is maturing, we must continue the good work that has been done to improve interoperability and enable the plug-and-play capabilities that Open RAN solutions provide.” More test centers are being set up and vendors are becoming more proactive when it comes to O-RAN testing. We hope that the industry can have some level of confidence in the success of Open RAN. It will take more effort.”
Radisys continues to collaborate with other companies in the open RAN ecosystem to advance standards-based interoperability and demonstrate the feasibility of multi-vendor solutions. In September 2023, Radisys won the Mobility Winner Award in the Cross-Vendor Mobility Award category at Stage 4 of the 2023 5G Challenge hosted by the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) Telecommunications Services Institute in collaboration with the Department of Defense. did. Radisys has demonstrated successful integration of a combination of open RAN central units (CUs) and distributed units (DUs) with partner Lions radio units (RUs) in the final element of the 2023 5G Challenge. , won the Mobility Award. Radisys was also named the winner in the Wraparound Emulation category and his second place winner in the Multivendor End-to-End Integration Award.
“What we demonstrated at the end of this 5G Challenge was the first-ever mobility handover scenario between two different open RAN vendors. We consider it a significant milestone and highlight of the event. ” said Shenbagaraman.
Commenting on the integration of Mimosa into Radisys following its acquisition from Airspan Networks in 2023, Shenbagaraman said, “Mimosa fits well into our portfolio and we now have a unified access portfolio. We are able to offer this to our customers.”
Mimosa offers a diverse set of point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connectivity solutions that leverage unlicensed spectrum bands. This enables rapid deployment of multi-gigabit per second fixed wireless access networks and wireless backhaul connectivity for telecommunications systems and latency-sensitive 5G applications.
Meanwhile, regarding the continued evolution of 5G technology, Shenbagaraman said Radisys is already working on 5G-Advanced. “We have already implemented some new features in 5G satellite communications as well as MIMO-related and mobility-related optimizations. We will gradually incorporate advanced features into our products,” he said. Told. At MWC, Radisys announces the launch of 5G Advanced Wireless Connectivity Software, which enables next-generation 5G advanced features to deliver increased accessibility and flexibility for low-latency, cloud-native solutions for both RAN and core networks Did.
“However, in the long term, the evolution of wireless networks will include more applications of AI. We expect AI-native wireless access networks to emerge in layer 1 and layer 2 capabilities. How can we intelligently control traffic radio resource management interference in all these aspects? All elements except perhaps radio will be cloud-native. This is what will happen in the future of RAN network evolution. “That’s what we expect,” he said. “These elements will be incorporated into his 6G standard and Open RAN will be the foundation of his 6G.”
