Rakuten Symphony Successfully Demonstrates Multi-vendor Connectivity using RIC in Open RAN Lab

Leading the promotion of Open RAN with technologies that contribute to reduced power consumption and improved network operations.

Rakuten Symphony, today announced the successful demonstration of RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) multi-vendor connectivity in Rakuten Mobile's testing environment.

Rakuten Mobile has been conducting research and development on RIC applications working with Rakuten Symphony’s RIC platform since February 2023 as part of a project commissioned by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), titled "Research and Development of Open RAN Wireless Communication Technologies to Realize Advanced RAN Infrastructure Beyond 5G."

Leveraging the benefits of Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native network and the findings of this research, Rakuten Symphony has demonstrated that RICs can be used to manage RAN efficiency and reduce overall network power consumption not only in Beyond 5G networks but also in 4G Open RAN networks.

In this demonstration for 4G Open RAN networks, Rakuten Symphony confirmed that Open RAN comprising multiple vendors could be intelligently controlled based on instructions from the RIC application. The demonstration also confirmed that optimizing the network according to traffic conditions and other factors can lead to improved Open RAN performance, as well as more efficient and energy-saving network operations. The RIC platform used (Non-RT RIC and Near-RT RIC) is a Symworld™ product developed independently by Rakuten Symphony in accordance with O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications.

The results of the successful demonstration were presented at PlugFest Fall 2023, an event to share the results of multi-vendor connectivity verification organized by the O-RAN ALLIANCE, a world-wide community of mobile operators, vendors, and research & academic institutions with the mission to re-shape Radio Access Networks to be more intelligent, open, virtualized and fully interoperable.

Rakuten Symphony will continue to promote Open RAN to facilitate the creation of an Open RAN ecosystem built with diverse vendors, while providing the most advanced solutions to the telecom industry.