Directed Testing of ORAN using a Partially Specified Declarative Digital Twin

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Declarative Digital Twin (DDT) technology for 5G RAN testing, enabling automated detection of hardware-software corner cases even with partial system specifications.

Contribution

It presents a novel DSL for describing RAN systems and demonstrates how an automated solver can identify critical corner cases from the DDT.

Findings

DDT can identify hardware-software corner cases.

The DSL enables partial system specification.

Automated solver effectively finds critical scenarios.

Abstract

Real Time performance testing can be divided into two distinct parts: system test and algorithm test. System test checks that the right functions operate on the right data within power, latency, and other constraints under all conditions. Major RAN OEMs, put as much effort into system test and debug as they do into algorithm test, to ensure a competitive product. An algorithm tester will provide little insight into real time and hardware-software (HW-SW) capacity as it is unaware of the system implementation. In this paper we present an innovative Digital Twin technology, which we call Declarative Digital Twin (DDT). A DDT can describe the system requirements of the RAN such that critical corner cases can be found via automation, that would normally be missed by conventional testing. This is possible even when the RAN requirements are only partially specified. We present a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for declarative description of the RAN and show results from an automated solver that demonstrate how potential HW-SW implementation related corner cases can be identified from the DDT of an ORAN DU.