Open RAN is an industry movement to promote disaggregation and interoperability of radio access networks – moving away from the closed vendor setup in legacy mobile networks. It follows the following principles:
- Disaggregation: Splitting the RAN into Radio Unit (O-RU), Distributed Unit (O-DU), and Centralized Unit (O-CU).
- Intelligence: Using intelligence for control and optimization via the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC)
- Virtualization & Cloudification: Implementing network functions as software on general-purpose hardware across edge, fog, and cloud platforms.
- Automation & Orchestration: Algorithms and frameworks to automatically manage and coordinate virtualized network functions