North American OTIC in Washington, D.C., Metro Area (Virginia Tech)

The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Alliance has designated the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative as North American Open Testing and Integration Center (OTIC) in Washington D.C./Arlington Va.

The CCI xG Testbed at the Virginia Tech Research Center (VTRC) in Arlington provides testing capabilities for end-to-end radio access network interoperability, conformance, and performance in lab and field environments.

As an OTIC, it supports both end-to-end open-source and multi-vendor O-RAN components. It also provides a platform to realize an end-to-end intelligent RAN control-loop supported by an Artificial Intelligence (AI)/ Machine Learning (ML) framework, which is embedded in the wireless network infrastructure.

CCI’s OTIC is strengthened with in-lab (VTRC) and field (Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg Campus) testing environments. These facilities are equipped with hardware and software that enables researchers to validate disaggregated RAN — Open Centralized Unit (O-CU); Open Distributed Unit (O-DU); Open Radio Unit (O-RU) — components across different locations and transport networks over the air (OTA).

OTIC enables researchers to test and validate RAN components’ interaction with Radio Intelligent Controllers (RICs) and AI/ML-based microservices/applications (i.e., xApps and rApps). Multi-vendor RAN components can be integrated into to our O-RAN in lab and field infrastructure and third-party applications can be easily onboarded via RIC dashboards and Service Management Orchestration (SMO) on the cloud or edge environment. OTIC offers additional O-RAN related services such as use case and proof-of-concept development and end-to-end open-source-based evaluation.

Partnerships

AT&T, DISH Network, and Verizon join CCI as OTIC co-hosts in uniting to realize OTIC’s mission of accelerating national O-RAN advancement, innovation, and deployment.