RICs and Apps executive summary

I first came across open RAN as a concept in 2016, as one of the teams I was supporting at Telefonica was looking into connecting the unconnected in Latin America. After ascertaining the demand, the primary problem to solve was affordability. It just wasn’t economical to deploy traditional RAN networks designed for dense urban environment in the middle of the jungle. The team came out with an interesting idea, the disaggregation of the RAN into components, allowing to pool resources and enabling multiple vendors to compete for different parts of the deployment.

After a few iterations and field trials, the team went on to write the first Open RAN RFI, jointly with Vodafone, released at TIP. From this idea, an ecosystem was born, with a community of operators and vendors, issuing specifications at the Open RAN alliance, elaborating and testing blueprints, issuing requirements and roadmap at the Telecom Infra Project and commercial deployments slowly spreading from Japan to Western Europe and North America.

As the first layer of disaggregation has split the gNodeB into the Radio Units, Centralized Units and Distributed Units, an ecosystem of vendors has emerged, addressing each or all the parts of this new architecture. That first layer of disaggregation was aimed at disrupting the traditional RAN ecosystem, breaking the oligopoly of vendors that have come to dominate the market.

The next stage of disaggregation is aimed at disrupting further the market, by introducing elements of vendor-independent centralized management, optimization, visualization and orchestration with the introduction of the Radio Interface Controllers (RICs). Two RICs have been defined, and although they share the same name, they are quite different in nature and ambition.

The non real time RIC is part of the Service Management and Orchestration layer and is the evolution of Self Organizing Networks (SON) and the RAN OSS / Element management. Features instantiated on the non real time RIC can be deployed as rApps, a standard-defined set of interfaces for multiple vendors to deploy.

The near real time RIC is a feature set belonging to the RAN layer and aimed at disaggregating it further. It extracts capabilities today embedded in the gNodeB, or the RU, CU, DU and provides a layer of abstraction and platform for multiple vendors to theoretically pilot and tune the Radio Network. xApps are the applications that can be developed to be deployed on near real time RIC.

From my experience at Telefonica, as an operator or at Bell Canada or Deutsche Telekom as advisor and consultant or from my time at NEC as global VP Product Management overlooking the development and partnerships surrounding open RAN products, or as an independent analyst researching the market, I have derived a unique perspective on the maturity and effectiveness of open RAN, RICs and Apps. 

This report examines the architecture, strength, drawbacks of open RAN RICs and apps as well as provides an inventory of the main players in the space.