This page describes the target use case for the OAM project to be demonstrated at the O-RAN Alliance face to face meeting in Montreal in the week Oct28 2024.
Objectives
This page is a working document to discussed and design the use cases and its components.
Use Case Description
Introduction
The O-RAN Alliance specifies two architectures or communications flows from O-RUs to the SMO for management traffic.
hierarchical All management traffic (OpenFronthaul Management Plane, OFHM) terminates at the O-DU. SMO OAM functions communicate with the O-RU only indirectly via the O-DU with the O-RU. Therefore the operations on O-RU data models are exposed by the O-DU using the RFC8528 YANG Schema Mount concept.
hybrid In such architecture some management traffic can by-pass the O-DU. SMO OAM functions can directly access the NETCONF Client of the O-RU. A typical use cases is software management. Which management traffic can by-pass the O-RU is handled by the Access Control configuration of the O-RU.
Implementation
The generated topology for about 7000 NRCellDus is too big to discuss the details of hierarchical and hybrid OAM Architectures.
We just need two O-RUs - let’s assume each O-RU implements just one NRCellDU and that the related O-DU in an edge cloud at the next tower.
The following figure shows 2 cells at one tower. At a second tower the O-DU-Edge-Cloud is located. Both towers are visualized as a dot. The cells are visualized by as polygon show the coverage. The overlap between both cells are for handover.
In this simple topology we have two towers with just 3 RAN nodes
1x O-DU at the top of the image
2x O-RUs at the bottom of the image.
We assume that the O-Cloud resource pools for O-CU, Near-RT-Ric, 5G-Core and SMO are also located close to the northern tower.
The topology described according ietf-network-topology as json encoding (RFC7951) looks like this: