Nokia and AT&T today announced the successful trial of innovative near real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) xApps with the native E2 interface. Nokia is the first major RAN vendor to natively support the Open RAN compliant near real-time RIC and the E2 interface for running xApps. This trial helped validate the promise of the near real-time RIC and xApp approach for advanced 5G use cases.
The trial was implemented on Nokia’s commercial near real-time RIC platform, running on Nokia AirScale base stations on AT&T’s network. In this trial, near real-time xApps utilized E2SM Policy Services to dynamically perform targeted RAN optimization. The benefit of near real-time RIC is that it can optimize services for specific user groups, different frequency layers, or based on Quality of Service (QoS) Class Identifiers in 5G networks. Nokia’s near real-time RIC platform and xApps also bring capabilities to utilize existing interfaces to enable RAN optimization use cases that suit the operator networks.