Acentury

In today's rapidly evolving telecommunications industry, characterized by advancements such as Open RAN and AI/ML applications, reproducing probable network scenarios to validate the functionality and performance of products, solutions, and policies presents a significant challenge. Addressing critical questions is imperative before introducing products to the market or deploying solutions and policies:

• How does Vendor X's O-DU interact with Vendor Y's O-RU amidst high packet loss on the fronthaul link?
• How does Vendor X's RAN solution adapt to the operator's existing policies under unstable network conditions?
• Or how do the operators' recently set policies, such as quality of service or pre-emptive functions, respond under adverse network conditions? This is where network impairment tools play a crucial role, aiding operators, vendors, and specialists in evaluating and optimizing their systems under adverse network conditions.
  
  

Controlling Networking Impairment Using Acentury LAMTA

In LAMTA 24.1, Acentury introduced the Network Impairment feature, allowing users to control impairment equipment directly from the LAMTA UI. This version facilitates remote control of the Teledyne LeCroy Chimera E100, which can be positioned between two nodes on xHaul, connections towards the core network, or any other wireline connection to induce impairments. Users can configure various types of impairments, including packet loss, latency, and drops on their preferred links, to validate the performance of their test setup.

Figure 1: LAMTA can now facilitate remote control of the Teledyne LeCroy Chimera E100, which can be positioned between two nodes on xHaul, connections towards the core network, or any other wireline connection to induce impairments.

Furthermore, in LAMTA 24.1, all configurations and controls of the Chimera E100 are consolidated on a single page, simplifying the monitoring, activation, or deactivation of impairments. LAMTA’s Network Impairment feature provides users with a comprehensive set of capabilities:

• enables users to review the status of different links, the list of devices connected to each pair of ports, reset port configurations, and activate or deactivate impairments.
• save determined impairment values as templates for future tests.
• activate multiple impairments simultaneously for each link using LAMTA's user interface.

Figure 2: LAMTA offers users with a comprehensive set of capabilities to make it easier to run Network Impairment scenarios

Let's explore a specific application using LAMTA’s Network Impairment feature to help eliminate physical changes or deployments: The evaluation of diverse RAN Cloud Architecture. For instance, we can adjust the latency between O-CU-UP, O-DU, and O-RU components and set it to zero to imply an architecture where all components are co-located at the cell site; we can also increase the delay between O-CU-UP and O-DU to replicate a scenario where O-CU-UP is located in the edge cloud, O-DU and O-RU are co-located in the cell site. These adjustments, achieved with just a click through LAMTA's Network Impairment feature, offer a seamless means of testing and refining network configurations.

Figure 3 - Adjusting the latency between various RAN components to simulate different Cloud RAN scenarios [1].

References:
[1] O-RAN WG6, Cloud Architecture and Deployment Scenarios for O-RAN Virtualized RAN, Technical Specification. See https://www.o-ran.org/specifications.

Testers and RF Lab managers immediately benefit with a testing experience that is more efficient, allows testers to test more with less time and labour at the physical office, and help operators ultimately get to market faster.

To learn more about our LAMTA product, click here.

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