Cloud-native O-RAN

WINLAB Summer Internship 2025

Interns: Sree Harshitha Jonnalagadda, Dominic Catena, Dhruv Ramaswamy

Advisors: Ivan Seskar, Tracy Van Brakle

Project Overview

We are part of the Cloud-native O-RAN team, actively collaborating with the ​O-RAN Testing Curriculum Development team, to advance the understanding and adoption of Open-RAN technologies.

As part of this collaboration, we are working on developing a course on Open RAN, hosted on our website ​Praxeum, in order to help fellow students acquire the knowledge needed to help accelerate the widespread adoption of Open, Programmable, Secure 5G.

In parallel, we Cloud-native team are working on the Hybrid-M plane testing project, which focuses on validating the interface between the O-RU framework and the SMO (Service Management and Orchestration) platform via the O-RU Controller. This project involves executing and analyzing standardized test cases (e.g., NETCONF session establishment, configuration data exposure, and management session verification), ensuring reliable and compliant M-Plane behavior in line with O-RAN specifications. We are also contributing to the development of new Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and custom test cases to extend the testing framework further.

Alongside, we are working with O-RAN Testing Curriculum Development team on designing/creating rApps for various O-RAN use cases.

Weekly Progress

Week 1

​Week-1 Presentation

• Read the ​O-RAN Alliance documentation provided by our advisor.

Week 2

​Week-2 Presentation

• Read the ​O-RU_ACCoRD_CloudBased provided by our advisor.

Week 3

​Week-3 Presentation

• Read the presentation ​https://www.orbit-lab.org/attachment/wiki/Other/Summer/2025/Cloud-Native-O-RAN/hybrid_mplane_testing_framework.pdf provided by Alexandru Stancu, an O-RAN expert.
• Studied and researched more about O-RAN Deployment Models.
• Worked on Hybrid M-plane Testing Framework Architecture.

Week 4

​Week-4 Presentation

• We referred to the github repositories:
  • ​https://github.com/o-ran-sc/it-tifg
  • ​https://github.com/o-ran-sc/oam/tree/master/solution
    These were mentioned by Alex.
• After studying the README files of the repositories, we understood that we need to set up two frameworks:
  • Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) for Operations and Maintenance (OAM) and O-RU framework to test the Hybrid M-plane.
• Prerequisites:
  The solution was tested on a virtual machine (VM in grid (ORBIT) or sb9 (ORBIT) nodes from ​make a reservation) with the following configuration:
  • 4 CPU cores
  • 16 GB RAM
  • 50 GB storage
  • Python 3.12 (default in Ubuntu 24.04)
  • Docker installed
• Firstly, we started by setting up the SMO for OAM framework and performed a step-by-step environment setup:
  • Created .env files
  • Configured domain settings
  • Built docker compose infrastructure
  • Simulated various network services (e.g., controller, VES collector)
  • Debugged and resolved common setup issues such as:
    • health checks
    • certificate installation (Opendaylight)
    • DNS/host issues
• The Opendaylight controller requires a certificate to be installed before it can be launched. It is installed via ​https://docs.opendaylight.org/en/latest/downloads.html

OpenDaylight:
Opendaylight (ODL) is an open-source, modular, and extensible Software-Defined Networking (SDN) platform designed to enable centralized network control and programmability. In the context of the O-RU and SMO frameworks for testing the Hybrid Management Plane (Hybrid M-plane) in O-RAN architecture, Opendaylight acts as the SDN controller responsible for managing and orchestrating network services, configurations, and state synchronization between components.

Within the SMO (Service Management and Orchestration) framework, Opendaylight plays a critical role in:

• Controlling and automating the configuration of the O-RU (O-RAN Radio Unit) over standardized interfaces (e.g., NETCONF/YANG).
• Simulating or managing the communication across the O-RAN M-plane, which blends traditional and virtualized infrastructure.
• Ensuring secure and policy-driven operations, such as certificate handling, device onboarding, and performance monitoring.

Its extensibility and compatibility with O-RAN-defined models make Opendaylight a foundational component for building a reference implementation that reflects the goals of a disaggregated, interoperable RAN.

Docker Containers Setup:

• By following the commands in the repository of SMO for OAM, we ran command for setting-up the docker containers.

Week 5

​Week-5 Presentation

• Completed the setup of SMO framework by running all the containers (healthy).
• The SMO framework is having a GUI named ODLUX (Opendaylight User Experience). We are able to access the web interface and are working on login access.

ODLUX (Opendaylight User Experience):

• A web-based graphical user interface (GUI) built on top of Opendaylight (ODL) SDN controller.
• Designed to act as the front-end interface for managing and visualizing network configurations, topologies, and operational data.
• Utilized in O-RAN SMO frameworks and ONAP platforms as a lightweight Network Management System (NMS) interface.
• Facilitates interaction with underlying YANG-modeled network services via RESTCONF or NETCONF APIs.
• Commonly used for functions like device onboarding, network inventory, operational status monitoring, and managing O-RU configurations in Hybrid M-plane setups.

Week 6

​Week-6 Presentation

Week 7

​Week-7 Presentation

Week 8

​Week-8 Presentation

Week 9

Week 10

Additional Documents

​UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) rApp Presentation