Provider of IoT software for critical infrastructure, Wind River, has announced that it has joined the O-RAN Alliance in an effort to further advance 5G network technologies. Championing the principles of openness and intelligence, the O-RAN Alliance is working to evolve radio access networks (RAN).
Wind River has been providing open source–based operating system and infrastructure platforms for RAN networks, such as UMTS and LTE, for more than a decade. As 5G continues to roll out, Wind River aims to ensure alignment with its open source platform infrastructure products and O-RAN. A leader in the early 5G landscape, Wind River technology is powering the majority of 5G RAN deployments.
Glenn Seiler, Vice President of Open Source Strategy at Wind River, said: “As the need for more advanced and agile services grows to meet the needs of 5G, it is important to work across the industry to support increasingly open architectures and standardized interfaces for greater interoperability.
“We look forward to contributing our expertise around proven infrastructure virtualization technologies and continue our work to help the industry develop the intelligent foundation needed for the next generation of telecommunications.”
Founded by telecommunications operators, the O-RAN Alliance is committed to further innovating radio access networks (RAN) built on virtualized network elements, white box hardware, and standardized interfaces with the core principles of openness and intelligence in mind.
With greater standardization and as interfaces become more open, this can accelerate RAN innovation and lower network costs to ultimately make virtual RAN easier to accomplish.
As an infrastructure provider, Wind River will focus on O-RAN workgroups where it can make key contributions, such as the Cloudification and Orchestration Workgroup and the White Box Hardware Workgroup.
Virtual RAN and C-RAN are two of the most common use cases for Wind River Linux and Wind River Titanium Cloud. With Wind River Linux, customers can be confident they are using the latest open source innovations, combined with the world-class global support and long-term maintenance that comes from the market-leading commercial-grade embedded Linux. Based on the technology behind the StarlingX open source project, Titanium Cloud is a high performance cloud infrastructure product for the network edge.
With open source being a core value for the O-RAN project, Yocto Project–based Wind River Linux and the StarlingX technologies available in Titanium Cloud can help customers deploy virtualized services faster, at lower cost, and with the strict uptime that 5G RAN will demand.
