POWDER and Rimedo Labs Use OCUDU for RF Jamming Detection
A version of this post was originally published on the POWDER website
POWDER and Rimedo Labs, a wireless R&D and consulting firm, have embarked on a collaboration to integrate and test jamming detection and mitigation capabilities on the OCUDU RAN software in an over the air (OTA) deployment. The work pairs Rimedo Labs’ existing Jamming Detection xApp (JD-xApp) with POWDER’s city-scale, software-defined radio testbed to validate radio access network (RAN) security capabilities under real-world OTA RF conditions rather than simulation alone. The collaboration targets the OCUDU RAN software, the open-source CU/DU implementation being developed by the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation.
This effort is part of a larger initiative to test and evaluate OCUDU across a range of use cases and network operating conditions, coordinated by the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation among organizations spanning industry and academia.
Why POWDER and Rimedo Labs
POWDER is an end-to-end platform for mobile wireless research, offering a variety of radio resources, including commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) O-RAN radio units (O-RUs) deployed in a real-world OTA environment, a user-configurable network, and access to compute, storage, and cloud resources. Researchers can use it to build wireless networks on existing technologies (4G, 5G, MIMO), emerging ones (6G, massive MIMO), or entirely new designs of their own. The platform spans a 6 km² area, on and around the University of Utah campus, with varied terrain, building types, and densities, supported by dozens of fixed stations and mobile nodes on campus shuttles. This makes POWDER a natural environment for validating OCUDU’s resilience against radio-layer threats such as jamming under conditions that lab benches cannot reproduce.
“We built POWDER as a city-scale living laboratory precisely so that work like this wouldn’t have to stay in the lab,” said Prof. Van der Merwe of POWDER. “Testing OCUDU’s performance for jamming resilience over the air, across real terrain and real interference, gives the community evidence they can’t get any other way.”
Rimedo Labs specializes in providing high-quality consulting, implementation, and R&D services for modern wireless systems and their AI/ML-based automation, currently focusing on 5G, O-RAN, and beyond. They bring several years of applied research into RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) based security, including the Jamming Detection and Mitigation xApp (JD-xApp). It is designed to identify radio jamming attacks by monitoring HARQ statistics and actively mitigating interference by adjusting scheduling parameters. Its capabilities have been previously demonstrated using an Amarisoft-based gNB in the lab, and the results were promising.
“We’ve already shown that near-real-time jamming detection and mitigation work over the air on an O-RAN-compliant stack,” said Dr Marcin Hoffmann of Rimedo. “The next step is proving the same approach against an open, community-developed CU/DU like OCUDU, in a testbed built for exactly this kind of large-scale, real-world experimentation.”
The results of the work will be publicly disseminated with details as the team progresses through its plans in the weeks ahead.
