12 July 2023

8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 16:00 BST

The O-RAN community is constantly considering new technologies and architectures that drive forward innovations in the 5G radio network and deliver best performance for any use case. There are some use cases where the best architecture is not always immediately obvious, with a need to balance various factors such as trade-offs in performance, complexity and cost. The current O-RAN 7-2a/b functional split provides a trade-off between uplink air interface performance, fronthaul bit rate and complexity. Whilst this architecture is still very relevant for many deployments, some concerns have been raised regarding uplink performance limitations of 7-2a/b for dense urban environments, which are exacerbated by increasing pressure on the fronthaul connection bandwidths.

As a result, O-RAN WG-4 is now considering proposals for an uplink performance improvement to the 7-2a/b split, by shifting or replicating certain processing functions (e.g. equaliser, estimator) from the O-DU to the O-RU, which has the added benefit of reducing the fronthaul bit rate.

AccelerComm will be hosting a technology webinar: New architectures for O-RAN – Approaches for maximising uplink performance, at 4pm BST on Wednesday July 12th.

During this webinar, you will learn about:

  • Market drivers, as seen from an optical connectivity vendor’s perspective, such as trends in increasing fronthaul rates, optical technologies and operational challenges in upgrading networks
  • Overview of O-RAN functional splits, including details of 7-2a/b signal processing requirements
  • Problems with 7-2a/b for dense urban environments – such as fronthaul bandwidth, uplink beamforming performance
  • AccelerComm’s view of the O-RAN proposals for the new uplink performance improvement split, including a description of the different architecture options and their relative advantages and disadvantages
  • Use cases where 7-2a/b remains the best solution, and how to decide
  • Details of the company’s modular IP portfolio for O-RU and O-DU

Registrants will also be invited to contribute to a poll on architecture options, whose results will be discussed during the presentation.