NEC said that the tests were conducted from August 2021 to June 2023

Japanese companies NEC and Fujitsu are currently conducting research and development of a technology for testing the interoperability of “post-5G” base stations compliant with O-RAN specifications.

In a release, the partners said that a connectivity testing environment using this technology was constructed at NEC’s U.K. laboratories and Fujitsu’s U.S. laboratories. The tests were conducted from August 2021 to June 2023.

The partners said that the results of these tests enabled them to reduce the interoperability testing time for base stations of different vendors by more than 30%, assuming the commercial environment of overseas telecommunications operators.

“In the post-5G era, ultra-low latency, massive simultaneous connectivity and other 5G functions will be further enhanced and become more widespread. This will lead to even lower power consumption and wider support for virtualization of networks, further driving the expansion of the telecommunications infrastructure market, including the replacement of existing base station equipment,” NEC said.

“To provide customers with higher quality communication services, operators are increasingly choosing the most suitable base station equipment from a variety of vendors for use in their own networks,” the company added.

NEC also noted that the O-RAN Alliance has promoted standardization for connections between multiple base station devices and has formulated conditions for connecting base stations from different vendors. However, testing the operability of connected devices is time-consuming because it must be performed by the operator, and even longer time is required if re-testing must be conducted to resolve defects, according to the Japanese company.

To address this problem, NEC and Fujitsu said they have established test environments in the U.K. and North America, where the companies conducted operational testing using a combination of profiles and base station equipment vendors used by various international operators and replicating operating conditions assuming actual commercial environments of operators in Europe and North America.

“NEC and Fujitsu have jointly developed a technology to automate the testing of interoperability between base station equipment from various vendors at the O-RAN fronthaul. They have enhanced the functionality to support the actual connection conditions used by operators in different countries and regions,” NEC added.

NEC and Fujitsu said that the reduction in the interoperability testing time will enable operators to shorten the lead time for deploying systems that combine O-RAN compliant base station equipment from different vendors, which will contribute in the construction of new networks in anticipation of future post-5G deployments.

Going forward, NEC and Fujitsu said they aim to utilize the technology developed in this project and the test environment for the technology in joint testing with operators and base station equipment vendors in Japan and internationally to shorten the time required to deploy O-RAN compliant equipment.