POWDER Collaborating with O-RAN ALLIANCE and Linux Foundation
The O-RAN Software Community (OSC), a collaboration between the O-RAN ALLIANCE and Linux Foundation, is using the POWDER platform at the University of Utah for automated testing of the various OSC software components.
OSC is an open source community under the Linux Foundation with a goal of developing open source software, aligned with the O-RAN ALLIANCE’s open architecture and specifications, to realize solutions that can be utilized for industry deployment.
Among the thirteen OSC projects, the Infrastructure, and the Integration & Test projects are currently using the POWDER “profile” mechanism to rapidly instantiate various OSC software components, e.g., the OSC Near RT RIC platform, the OSC AI/ML framework etc. These OSC components are instantiated as POWDER “experiments”, and used as building blocks in complex testing scenarios.
To execute test scenarios, the OSC makes use of the POWDER platform APIs to programmatically start up the right set of building blocks to perform testing in an automated manner. For example, it may start an experiment that instantiates the latest stable version of the OSC Near RT RIC platform, and then deploy the KPIMON xApp on top of it, followed by basic health checks and other tests. Once a specific test run completes, and the results are verified, the xApp can be “undeployed” and another xApp onboarded for further testing with this version of the Near RT RIC platform. Alternatively, the experiment can be terminated, and re-instantiated with an alternative version of the Near RT RIC platform.
The OSC team has checked POWDER profiles related to their testing into the OSC “it/test” repository and it can be checked out with the command “git clone https://gerrit.o-ran-sc.org/r/it/test”.
In the future, OSC plans to expand the collaboration with POWDER on O-RAN end-to-end testing, based on open source components.
