Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / About ITS / 2024 / 2024 RIC Forum a Smashing Success
2024 RIC Forum a Smashing Success
ITS, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense’s FutureG Office, hosted the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) Forum in Dallas, Texas, from March 26 to 28.
The 2024 RIC Forum brought government, military, telecommunications infrastructure vendors, and academia to view live technical demonstrations and to discuss the current state of the Open RAN market. The high level of interest in the success of Open RAN and the RIC was evident with 149 in-person attendees and up to 259 attending virtually over the three days.
The RIC Forum kicked off with demonstrations of RIC xApps and rApps that give 5G networks unprecedented flexibility to dynamically adjust network performance. The RIC Forum encompassed 10 live xApp and rApp demos, one after the other.
The last day encompassed a series of keynotes and panel discussions on business implications, deployment issues, and the potential for RIC Apps to improve telecommunication networks.
The RIC is a radio access network (RAN) Intelligent Controller in an Open RAN network. RIC Applications (Apps) manage network functions in near-real time (xApps) and non-real time (rApps), providing network programmability to maximize performance.
The vision of the RIC Forum was Authentic xApp and rApp demonstrations to showcase the current state of Open RAN RIC xApps and rApps. Live App demos provided attendees assurances that they were seeing actual network responses—not simulations.
Impressively, all of the live demonstrations worked, and the fact that they were not seamless confirms that these were real demos of actual systems. This goes a long way toward demonstrating the readiness of RIC xApps and rApp for commercial deployment.
The RIC Forum saw new ideas put forward, such as concepts for dynamic service models and formal verification of App security. The ideas shared at the RIC Forum promise to stimulate discussion in industry and at the O-RAN ALLIANCE. We saw diverse use cases, including spectrum management, cybersecurity, energy saving, frequency band management, traffic steering, policy-based prioritization, and quality of service.