The diversification strategy of the UK Government aims to invest into addressing the challenge of diversifying the UK’s supply market for radio equipment. The R&D focus is the development of physical hardware, software/virtualised solutions, and testing with live networks to showcase the O-RAN capability to enable diversification of suppliers. O-RANOS project brings together a strong consortium of industry and academia to develop an O-RAN end-to-end solution capable to host a diversity of vendors within the infrastructure.  To accomplish such UK capability within this call, the University of Bristol (UoB) an O-RAN Alliance member is the leading academic partner of the project equipped with 5G testbeds able to host necessary research for efficiently maintaining complex multi-vendor O-RAN infrastructure. In particular, UoB will contribute to developing a purpose-designed monitoring platform for O-RAN infrastructure, that operates alongside the O-RAN RIC architectural component. Combining NRF and NWDAF provides a standard pathway for creating automated analytics engines across the network, thus enabling seamless and data-driven integration of multiple vendors in the infrastructure.      

Furthermore, the value of AI for automating instructions to RIC is critical, for example, Radio Resource Management (RRM) could be significantly optimized by utilizing ML models trained with data from the entire network. Moreover, the power efficiency of the O-RAN infrastructure will require such data for reducing OPEX for operators. For this advancement, UoB will contribute to enhancing the monitoring solution with a dataset fusion mechanism that facilitates AI models trained with foreign data points generating value at the feature engineering step of the process. This design will not only streamline the ML process but also enable resource management across vendors.  

Building such complex tools is the key to delivering a heterogenous power-efficient O-RAN infrastructure capable of hosting and orchestrating software to COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) hardware. However, there is a price to pay for such complex solutions which is the increased complexity of O-RAN security. To this end, UoB will work and assist Weaver Labs in investigating and adopting a Zero Trust Architecture for security working with the A1 interface. Zero trust is a very promising security concept that is improved by continuous monitoring, thus fitting perfectly with the monitoring capability developed within the project.