OSC Community Lab: The Integration Test Bed for O-RAN Software Community

TL;DR

This paper describes the OSC Community Lab, an integration test bed for O-RAN software, which facilitates interoperability testing among open-source projects to support O-RAN Alliance specifications.

Contribution

It introduces the design, implementation, and operational status of three OSC Community Laboratories for testing O-RAN software components.

Findings

Successful deployment of three laboratories for interoperability testing

Enhanced collaboration among O-RAN open-source projects

Identification of challenges in large-scale integration testing

Abstract

O-RAN Software Community (OSC) is an open-source project collaborated by O-RAN Alliance and Linux Foundation, aiming to develop reference software components based on 3GPP and O-RAN Alliance specifications. The OSC has twelve projects. Among them, the Integration and Testing (INT) project is responsible for testing the requirements documented in each release for end-to-end and use case testing. Three OSC Community Laboratories were built to speed up the integration and interoperability testing among different projects. This paper summarizes the software components developed by OSC projects and the status of the three OSC Community Laboratories. The activities of each laboratory, how the community collaborates, and the challenges we encountered along the way were elaborated.