Towards Private 5G O-RAN Implementation: Performance and Business Validation

Abstract

The requirements in terms of security, packet drop, and reliability (i.e., jitter) for the applications such as Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), Industrial IoT (IIoT) have become more demanding and subsequently, motivate the need for private 5G deployment. In general, 5G NR base stations (gNB) can be either deployed in integrated mode (PHY, MAC, and PDCP layers in one node) or split architecture mode, also known as O-RAN (lower PHY Radio Unit (RU), and the remaining layers from higher MAC to Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP) at Base Band Unit (BBU)). This paper showcases the first private 5G NR Standalone deployment with O-RAN architecture on the shared spectrum i.e., Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) frequency from 3.55 to 3.7 GHz. Since many private 5G deployments (e.g., warehouses with IoT devices such as IP cameras) are uplink heavy due to the nature of the traffic, we configure the UL-heavy 5G NR network and study the reliability of the system in the loaded and unloaded scenarios for both static and mobile environments.