ONF is pleased to announce the release of SD-RAN v1.3. This release brings two new use cases to the RIC, one involving Mobile Handovers and the other introducing RAN Slicing.
In the first use case, the high level objective is to balance UE load across cells in the RAN by monitoring cell load (#UEs/cell) and then moving mobile UEs to achieve efficient balance. In SD-RAN v1.2 this was achieved via an MLB (Mobility Load Balancing) xApp, but with v1.3 an MHO (Mobile Handover) xApp has been leveraged. This update also led to a new Service Model and extensive changes to RANSim to simulate mobility, expose RSRP metrics to the RIC and change RRC state.
RAN Slicing is an important feature for ensuring UEs experience the desired QoS in a shared medium such as the RAN. In the second use case, the LTE whitebox CU/DU software was enhanced to introduce Downlink (DL) RAN Slicing on the DU via a new Service Model. This functionality will continue to be developed in future releases by introducing Uplink (UL) Slicing and more sophisticated scheduling algorithms and UE-to-slice association mechanisms.
Additional improvements were made to the RIC platform, such as the ability to run multiple instances of the E2 Termination (E2T) microservice for high availability and horizontal scalability. The platform was also upgraded to support the official O-RAN E2AP v2.0 interface while also maintaining support for the earlier version (v1.01). Significant progress in tooling will enable SD-RAN to benefit from fully-automated conversion of E2-AP messages and SM definitions in the near future.
The full release notes are available on the SD-RAN documentation site. This project is licensed under the ONF Member-Only Software License, and members wishing to be granted access to the SD-RAN v1.3 resources and repositories should contact membership@opennetworking.org. Now that SD-RAN v1.3 has been released to ONF members, v1.2 will be released as open source under Apache 2.0 per the SD-RAN Trailing Release Policy.
The SD-RAN community includes leading operators and vendors embracing the open RAN movement and the vision of a vendor-agnostic nRT-RIC to help enable multi-vendor interoperability. New members are always welcome - to learn more or to join the community, please email membership@opennetworking.org. To stay updated on the project’s progress, we recommend subscribing to the SD-RAN Announce mailing list.
