Technical documents

Technical documents

• Joint white paper -SMO Deployment Challenges in an Open RAN Environment- NTT DOCOMO and Vodafone published a joint white paper regarding the SMO deployment. It introduces the expected advantages along with the challenges it will face as the standardisation and implementation of Open RAN proceeds. It also explains the different approaches for these challenges, offering advice for the wide operator and vendor community for a successful deployment of SMO.
  Please click the link to read the article in Vodafone's webstite
• Joint white paper -O-RU/O-DU Integration Challenges in an Open RAN Environment- NTT DOCOMO and Vodafone published a joint white paper offering advice to the wider operator and vendor community when testing the integration of key Open RAN software and hardware building blocks.
  Please click the link to read the article in Vodafone's webstite
• 5G Open RAN Ecosystem Whitepaper DOCOMO promotes the activity of "5G Open RAN Ecosystem," which aims to provide open RAN around the world to flexibly meet the diverse needs. The white paper introduces the aims of the Open RAN ecosystem and expected benefits and use cases associated with Open RAN deployment. This paper also addresses the challenges of deploying Open RAN, especially vRAN, and their possible solutions and summarizes target performance indicators for Open RAN.
• Initiatives toward Open RAN vRAN virtualization Open RAN The 5G mobile network will need to support a wide range of services compared with past networks. To meet this need, it will be necessary to construct a flexible network that can accommodate all kinds of services. Open RAN can make this a reality. This article provides an overview of the Open RAN concept, presents the current state of the O-RAN ALLIANCE that promotes Open RAN standards, and describes the 5G Open RAN Ecosystem, a new NTT DOCOMO Open RAN initiative.
• Initiatives towards vRAN vRAN virtualization Open RAN There is growing demand for high processing performance in wireless base station equipment as bit rates and capacity continue their upward trend in Long-Term Evolution and fifth-generation mobile communications system networks. To meet this demand, NTT DOCOMO has been using purpose-built hardware and software. At the same time, technical innovation in cloud computing for web services has been remarkable as reflected by ongoing improvements in hardware performance and increasing decoupling of hardware and software provided via virtualization and cloud-computing technologies. These innovative technologies should lead to superior wireless base-station design and solutions so that a more disaggregated and efficient Radio Access Network (RAN) can be achieved. The development and commercialization of such equipment is moving forward as RAN virtualization is becoming predominant. This article describes NTT DOCOMO initiatives toward RAN virtualization technology.
• Initiatives toward Intelligent RAN RIC AI/ML automation The network of the 5G era must be able to support many and varied applications, which means ever increasing complexity. It will therefore not be easy to control and optimize network operations by manual means as done in the past. At NTT DOCOMO, we are developing RIC technology now being standardized at the O-RAN ALLIANCE with the aim of achieving more autonomous and automatic RAN operations, that is, intelligent RAN, by using machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence, big data, etc. This article describes the state of RIC standardization at the O-RAN ALLIANCE and presents NTT DOCOMO’s approach to use cases and a roadmap toward intelligent RAN.