PlugFest Fall 2024 @ i14y Lab

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We at the i14y Lab, supported by Deutsche Telekom, EANTC, and i14y Lab consortium partners, and as part of the Joint European Venue alongside Vodafone, Orange, TIM, and Eurecom, are happy to have been one of the 11 venues in hosting the O-RAN ALLIANCE Global PlugFest Fall 2024, which has now been officially and successfully completed.

Sit down with Ajesh on energy efficiency in greater detail

At the i14y Lab we had 16 participating vendors, namely Aivader, Analog Devices (ADI), Capgemini, CommScope, Ericsson, Future Connections, IS Wireless, Juniper, Keysight, Nokia, Radisys, Rohde & Schwarz, SRS, VIAVI, VVDN, and Zinkworks, cooperating on 10 test setups, generating results that advance the development of innovative O-RAN based technologies and solutions.

This time around, we had

Two O-RU conformance tests
Six end-to-end scenarios with O-RU/O-DU/O-CU,
Two network optimization scenarios focused on traffic steering, energy efficiency, and new use cases.

An overview of the test cases we had

The test cases we had overall represented the diverse areas this falls’ plugfest focused on, as mentioned in the O-RAN Alliance press release, such as:

Performance improvements of open and interoperable RAN in combination with intelligent network management functions, based on Near-Real-Time and Non-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controllers (RIC)
RIC solutions newly developed by providers, operators and academic institutions
Network energy savings measured according to ETSI energy efficiency test specifications
Using open-source software to deliver RAN functions

Some details on the tests

One of the two conformance tests also included an energy consumption test based on ETSI models. The other was testing an all-digital O-RU, that passed all pre-selected O-RAN ALLIANCE WG4 and the 3GPP 38.141 tests, while demonstrating the DL simulcast and UL summing use case.

Two E2E setups with K8 based O-DU/O-CUs showed interesting results. One successfully measured the power consumption of whole a E2E setup including O-CU/O-DU & O-RU in different load conditions. The other compared poser consumption measurements of O-CU/O-DU pods (measured by Kepler) and O-RU and Server (measured via PDU socket and Redfish), concluding that there is a need for defined methods to make measurements comparable.

We were also host to three RIC (Near-RT & Non-RT) related test scenarios, testing in two cases onboarding, integrating, and running energy saving xApps and rApps respectively. The third test scenario showed multiple E2E RAN/xApp integration scenarios on single near-RT RIC for isolation verification.

Virtual showcase coming up in early 2025

As always, all the results reside with the O-RAN ALLIANCE, which plans to include more details from the O-RAN Global PlugFest Fall 2024 into its PlugFest Virtual Showcase in early 2025.

On our page for the O-RAN Global PlugFest Fall 2024 at the i14y Lab you can get some more details on what went down during the PlugFest.

Meanwhile, we are looking forward to 2025 and another PlugFest at the i14y Lab.