Overview
Interns: Ayden Wheless, Rahul Biju, Joseph Malkasian, Sonia Malhotra, Hasini Nandyala
Advisors: Ivan Seskar, Tracy Van Brakle
Working in collaboration with the Cloud Native O-RAN team, we are working on developing a course on Open RAN, hosted on our website Praxeum, in order to help fellow students acquire the knowledge needed to help accelerate the widespread adoption of Open, Programmable, Secure 5G. Also working on designing/creating rApps for various O-RAN use cases.
Week 1 Activities
Began familiarizing ourselves with the Open RAN ecosystem and the O-RAN Alliance.
Also began work on Praxeum website and our O-RAN class objectives.
Week 2 Activities
Began working on the curriculum and got Praxeum up and running.
Started work on a security rApp which implements TACACS+ in order to handle centralized AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting).
Week 3 Activities
Taught our first O-RAN class to other WINLAB interns/faculty.
Started configuring the TACACS+ server on the Orbit nodes, as well as a simple Python script to act as a client side connection.
Week 4 Activities
Held our second O-RAN class for WINLAB interns/faculty, focused on disaggregation, functional splits, control/user planes, and logical interfaces.
Successfully configured the TACACS+ server on Orbit and succesfully authenticated various users using the Python script.
Week 5 Activities
Held our third O-RAN class for WINLAB interns/faculty. This lesson focused on the importance of open interfaces in Open RAN, their benefits, as well as key O-RAN Alliance specifications.
Familiarized ourselves with the software defined radios on the Orbit testbed. Looked into ways to integrate the rApp's use case with the radios.
Week 6 Activities
Had to push back the fourth week of O-RAN curriculum to week 7. Possibly involving students from The University of Texas at Dallas, as well as university students from South Korea.
Received new rApp use case documentation specified by the O-RAN Alliance from our advisor, looked into several possible use cases regarding UAV resource allocation.
Week 7 Activities
Held our fourth O-RAN class focused on network function virtualization (NFV) as well as the benefits and challenges associated with virtualization and cloudification of RAN functions. We were joined by Leland Brown of Capgemini who gave a small talk regarding Open RAN following our class.
Met with Martin Skorupski and Alex Stancu of Highstreet Technologies to discuss rApp development, use cases, and the challenges involved. Looking into sample rApp repositories in order to begin work on a Hello World style rApp.
Week 8 Activities
Held week 5 of our O-RAN curriculum. This week focused on the benefits, challenges, and use cases of Open RAN.
Met with our advisors to discuss rApp use cases, as well as various issues such as time constraints and incomplete standards.
Week 9 Activities
Held week 6 of our O-RAN curriculum. This week's lesson concentrated on the standardization and future trends of Open RAN.
Started setup of HelloWorld rApp.
