O-RAN 7.2 Campus Network: An Experience Paper

Abstract:
Open-source-based mobile networks like 5G O-RAN are gaining increased importance, especially for industrial use cases, where certain Quality of Service (QoS) constrains must be fulfilled in order to meet production efficiency or quality. Such O-RAN networks are subject to recent theoretical research regarding the overall concepts, but practical approaches and experiences on setting up and operating such networks are lacking. In this paper a fully operational 5G network compliant to the 7.2 split of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has been built by using open source and O-RAN components. Therefore, this paper aims to fill the aforementioned gap by providing key results and experiences on creating and operating such a network, as well as overall measurements on the network quality and performance. The results show that the 7.2 split poses some major setup challenges compared to a Software-Defined- Radio-based approach. However, the measured performance characteristics do also indicate a significant increase in network throughput, area coverage and decreased latency. Nevertheless, fine-tuning of the network is required in order to further enhance the performance and quality and to unfold the full potential of the network.