O-RAN Component Names

Owned by Martin Skorupski
Last updated: Apr 06, 2021
2 min read

Table of Contents

Scope

Even in smaller RAN networks, it is quite confusion when description and discussing issues when there is no clear naming conventions are assigned.

This page proposes a naming conventions to serve the O-RAN-SC use cases.

Naming Convention

The O-RAN Architecture defines a hierarchy of components. This hierarchy should be reflected in the component names. Typically a distinguish name can be used. The drawback of such distinguish names is, that those become very long within a hierarchy. To shorten the names the O-RAN Component name concatenated with  a local identifier compared it its hierarchy level could be used. 

Example:

O-RU-12123

"O-RU" is the O-RAN Component Name.

The "identifier" 12123 is a combination of the local-ids in the hierarchy.

  • 1.... -> SMO #1
  • 12... -> Near-RT-RC #2
  • 121.. -> O-CU #1
  • 1212. -> O-DU #2
  • 12123 -> O-RU #3

Note: Obviously this naming conventions has its limitation but should be able to server O-RAN-SC use cases. In more complex scenarios more complex rules must be applied. 

Instance Diagram

The following diagram show O-RAN component instances with the following patter:

  • 2x Near-RT-RICs are assigned to the SMO
  • each Near-RT-RIC controls 2 logical O-CUs which are disaggregated into O-CU-UP and O-CU-CP.
  • each logical O-CU has F1 interfaces to 2x O-DU and
  • each O-DU controls 3x O-RUs.

The blue associations describe the OAM related traffic in a hybrid O-RAN architecture. 

  • OpenFronthaul M-Plane from O-RUs to the SMO
  • O1 from all other O-RAN components to the SMO