Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / Research / 5G / IORS / 2025.08 IORS

IORS Virtual Meeting, August 20, 2025

Improving test plans

This virtual meeting drew on participants‘ experience to improve the Open RAN test plans. Topics included standardizing requirements, specifying test equipment configurations, developing automation, and vetting the plans by performing quality assurance at various international labs. Our goal is to iteratively improve the test plans to meet operator needs and incorporate practical knowledge of labs that have used various test equipment configurations.

Logistics

  • Moderator: Lincoln Lavoie (University of New Hampshire, UNH-IOL)
    • O-RAN ALLIANCE, Eng Wei Koo 
    • Telecom Infra Project (TIP), Abdel Bagegni 
    • VIAVI Automated Lab-as-a-Service for Open RAN (VALOR), Ian Wong 
    • Acceleration and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments (ACCoRD), David Chiang 
    • Open RAN Center for Integration & Deployment (ORCID), Jens Sohn 
  • Virtual Meeting on August 20, 2025
  • Video recording available temporarily to registered attendees only

If you have questions, contact us directly at iors@ntia.gov.

Event Summary

This IORS virtual session focused on the review of the scope of testing work provided or under development by each stakeholder organization: O-RAN ALLIANCE, TIP, and NTIA’s Testing & Evaluation (T&E) Awardees: ACCoRD, ORCID, and VALOR. 

The goal of the session was to review this combined scope of testing and to identify gaps or areas where additional work or coordination may be required. Several of the NTIA T&E Awardees are focused on aligning to or contributing their testing results to the O-RAN ALLIANCE, which further ensures alignment and limits any overlaps of efforts.

Given these alignments, the general feelings from the discussions were that the functional testing is currently well documented, with reasonable coverage of the O-RAN specifications. For performance testing, work is underway to extend the current testing coverage in several spaces. Two gaps that were identified by the discussions were: 1) the application of 3GPP feature testing to O-RAN deployments, such as carrier aggregation, and 2) the definition of a common framework of testing for deployability (such as network stability, maintenance or upgrade procedures).