Space materials, AI in £88m to boost Open RAN bandwidth
The UK government is backing a series of trials of Open RAN telecoms tech in high capacity sporting venues and tourism hotspots with £88m.
The £88m (€100m) Open RAN funding is awarded to 19 projects through the Open Networks Ecosystem (ONE) competition to demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of technology with high volume bandwidth requirements in busy cities, airports, stadiums, or large venues where many people use their devices simultaneously.
The projects will initiate trials of open 5G networks in major UK urban centres in Glasgow, Cambridge, Liverpool, Bath, and the City of London, as well as Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, the National eSport Arena, Cambridge Corn Exchange, and Shelsley Walsh motorsport venue.
Projects include Space Forge for materials built in space, new timing chips and new machine learning algorithms at the edge and in the data centre.
- Space Forge teams with Northrop Grumman forspace materials
- Swiss chip designer Kandou expands into Silicon Glen
- BT to trial European liquid cooling technologies
The projects will run until March 2025 as part of the government’s Open Networks Research and Development Fund and comes as the four major network operators BT/EE, Three UK, Virgin Media O2, and Vodafone have signed up to use Open RAN for 35% of their total network traffic by 2030.
The 5G SWaP+C project with BT, Space Forge and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult will develop high-frequency and energy-efficient ultra wide band gap power amplifiers for massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems. Space Forge is looking to build the GaN substrates in low earth orbit to improve the thermal performance.
“This cutting edge project will provide greater supply chain resilience and enable us to steer innovation to gain global competitive advantage. There is clear demand for high-performance energy-efficient 5G/6G components. The project will fabricate and characterise new technical RF front ends to show the operational benefits for network operators,” said Fraser Burton, Senior Manager for Network Physics at BT.
“We will measure the performance uplift as a function of frequency with enhanced thermal interface materials and cooling. Novel material fabrication can significantly reduce the energy consumption of terrestrial wireless communications whilst also delivering improved RF performance.”
- Accelleran in TIP-led Open RAN drive funded by UK
- Global partnership to boost Open RAN
- First 5G multi-vendor OpenRAN intelligent controller
The ARIANE (Accelerating RAN Intelligence Across Network Ecosystems) project with the Telecom Infra Project, BT, Arqit and Viavi Solutions aims to test the impact on an Open RAN network of multiple apps running individually and concurrently in a multi-radio environment. The outcomes include results of testing a set of prioritised purpose-built AI/ML applications on network performance, as well as insights for the standards community on conflict management, security-by-design, and interface performance.
“The RAN Intelligence arena has expanded massively in terms of new use cases, new vendor-led AI/ML based applications and operators taking the opportunity to test out the performance and optimisation effects on traditional and Open RAN networks,” said Vishal Mathur, Global Head of Engagement at the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) which has been a leading driver of Open RAN technologies and standards.
“But the arena is maturing and is in need of a marketplace of tested and certified solutions that deliver performance benefit for mobile network operations, as well as furthering of standards in Open RAN interface design.
The Energy-efficient Composable Optical Topologies for Assembled Processing (ECO-TAP) project with Ultracell Networks and King’s College London is developing a new Hybrid Cellular-Switched Topology to improve the energy consumption and resource utilisation of servers through disaggregation with new machine learning (ML) algorithms for processing steering in RIC and introducing for the first time server disaggregation in Open RAN for processors.
The 5G MoDE (HDD on wheels) project with Virgin Media 02, Mavenir and the University of Surrey will focus on RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) Intelligence, power-saving and capacity optimisation, centralised cloud units, zero-footprint implementation, and Massive MIMO AAUs.
“We are excited and honoured to have been awarded funding for the 5G MoDE (MoRAN) project as the lead partner,” said Dr David Owens, Head of technical trials at Virgin Media O2. “Virgin Media O2 is looking forward to embarking on this journey and working collaboratively with our consortium partners to deliver a ground-breaking solution that we hope will revolutionise oRAN network management in highly dense environments. This funding will enable us to accelerate the development of 5G oRAN, bringing us closer to our vision of a highly optimised and sustainable mobile connectivity future.
5G Open RAN Factory of the Future
The FoFoRAN (Factory of Future) project brings together the AMRC at the University of Sheffield), Dassault Systemes, aql, Productive machines and Safenetics to develop, test, and showcase flexible Open RAN deployment approaches for the manufacturing sector.
“The FoFoRAN project builds on the successful 5G Factory of the Future test bed and trials programme, showcasing how Open RAN-based telecom infrastructure can enhance productivity and efficiency in manufacturing. This advancement may lead to carbon reduction and faster market access, benefiting smaller players in telecom and manufacturing tech,” said Professor Rab Scott, director of industrial digitalisation for the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC).
Project AURA (Agile Universal Radio Architecture) brings together Parallel Wireless UK, Kandou Bus and BT to design a tightly integrated open radio unit with an emphasis on flexibility to target different frequency bands and form factors, greater power efficiency, and with the goal to manufacture the product in the UK at competitive cost.
Key to the ability to achieve this is the use of new chips and components such as the timing chips from Kandou. These, and the associated software that will be developed, are at the core of the reduction in manufacturing complexity and power consumption which will translate to lower installation and running costs for mobile network operators, improving the sustainability.
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