Cloud Native ORAN Testing in Your Pipeline

This presentation demonstrates the integration of cloud-native testing for the ORAN E2 interface using the CNF Test Suite. The ORAN E2 interface is a key component of Radio Intelligent Controllers (RIC) and XApps, which are important elements of the ORAN architecture. The CNF Test Suite is used for this testing process, employing tools like SRSRAN to validate the e2 traffic between the DU and the RIC. These tools are designed to test cloud-native network functions (CNFs) in a Kubernetes environment, evaluating them against various characteristics such as configuration, compatibility, state management, resilience, and security in your CI/CD pipeline.

1. Cloud Native O-RAN Testing in Your Pipeline Andre Puschmann, Software Radio Systems W.Watson, Vulk Cooperative

2. Cloud Native O-RAN Testing in Your Pipeline May 1, 2024 | San Jose, CA 2:00pm - 2:30pm PT W. Watson Principal Vulk Cooperative Andre Puschmann VP Engineering Software Radio Systems Ltd

3. Who are we? What is the srsRAN Project? Why should we test O-RAN Interfaces? Which O-RAN interface are we testing? What tools did we use to test? Demo Agenda

4. Building The Linux Kernel of RAN Complete Portable Performant Open Flexible Interoperable

5. Key Features and Performance 3GPP Release 17 aligned - eMBB and NTN support All relevant interfaces defined in 3GPP/ORAN/SCF All bandwidths for FDD/TDD FR1 MIMO 4T4R - 4 layer downlink DL and 2 layer UL ORAN 7.2 split for RU All RRC and MAC procedures including mobility Performance: 500+ UEs per cell, 24/7 operation 1500 Mbps DL, 200 Mbps UL (w/o HW acceleration )

6. srsRAN User Experience and Engagement Simplify Telco! Documentation Developers guide Testing Application notes Github discussions Get it all on docs.srsran.com Engagement Guides Code Testing

7. Development Workflow and CI/CD for RAN New testing challenges New components, interfaces and vendors End-to-end approach involving RAN equipment Testing means Extensive In-house CI/CD pipelines 4845 unit and integration tests, 140 E2E ORAN Test and Integration Centers, e.g. POWDER testbed at Utah Vision Truly open, inclusive, and vendor-agnostic testing facility Open test plans and test cases as code

8. What is the CNTi Testsuite ? Formerly the CNCF CNF Testsuite Part of LF Networking’s Cloud Native Telecom Initiative ( CNTi ) Tests Cloud Nativeness of workloads Specializes in testing telecommunication software

9. CNTi Community

10. What is a Cloud Native RAN? A RAN with its software components deployed to Cloud native architecture which uses immutable infrastructure, declarative configuration, and microservices This is exemplified by putting the 5g core and RAN into containers and hosting them in Kubernetes.

11. Why Should We Test O-RAN Interfaces? Cnti-Testsuite tests mostly horizontal cloud native concerns for telecommunications One of our biggest requests is to test more telco specific traffic where possible Several communication service providers have committed to supporting the O-RAN standard Support vendor onboarding and vendor interoperability with community maintained tests

12. Challenges With Testing Cloud Native O-RAN Interfaces The RAN is expensive to test In order to test mobile specific traffic, we need a mobile specific harness around telco components How do we identify what pods receive specific types of traffic? How do we capture the network traffic in K8s?

13. What we tested: the O-RAN E2 interface ORAN E2 interface

14. What Did We Use to Test? srsUE and srsRAN to generate the traffic s rsRAN ZMQ emulator from UE to GNB FlexRIC for RIC framework Cnf-testsuite to parse the captured traffic Labels to identify the Xapp core components Tshark to capture the network traffic The e2ap filter ClusterTools To integrate Tshark with K8s

15. How Do We Run The O-RAN Tests for the RAN? Install the 5g core ./cnf-testsuite cnf_setup cnf-config=sample-cnfs/sample_srsran_ueauth_open5gs/cnf-testsuite.yml Install the the RAN simulator with RIC example ./cnf-testsuite cnf_setup cnf-config=sample-cnfs/sample-oran-ric/cnf-testsuite.yml Run the RAN E2 verifier . /cnf-testsuite oran_e2_connection Inspect the output of the results.yml

16. Demo Documentation: https://github.com/cncf/cnf-testsuite/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/cncf/cnf-testsuite/blob/main/USAGE.md#ran-tests

17. O-RAN Test Roadmap E1 (CU -> UP) E2 Handler (DU -> RIC) F1-C Control Plane (CU-CP -> DU) F1-U User Plane (CU-UP -> DU) FAPI+ (DU High -> DU Low) NG (CU -> 5g Core) O1 (Near RT-RIC -> SMO) A1 (Near RT-RIC -> Non-RT RIC

18. Collaborate with Us Contribute to the Test Catalog Weekly on Tuesdays (Next: May 7) https://github.com/cnti-testcatalog https://lists.lfnetworking.org/g/lfn-cnti Austin Software Cooperatives Meetup Monthly (Next: May 8) bit.ly/coop-meetup Contact Vulk vulk.coop/contact Connect on Linkedin linkedin.com/in/wavell Contribute to srsRAN Project github.com/srsran Reach out and get the docs srsran.com docs.srsran.com Connect on Linkedin and X srs.io linkedin.com/softwareradiosystems/

19. Evolving Together: Cloud Native Telecom's Journey Forward May 1, 2024 | San Jose, CA 3:40pm - 4:10pm PT W. Watson Principal Vulk Cooperative Olivier Smith Office of the CTO MATRIXX Software

20. Thank You! Q&A