Abstract

5G technology is the cornerstone for new services like eMBB, uRLLC, and mMTC, thus it should be globally available and affordable to make these services a reality. Yet most vendors responsible for the manufacturing of 5G hardware equipment and software still utilize and adopt the classical closed radio access network (RAN) concept. Consequently, this forces mobile operators, who want to deploy such equipment to build 5G cellular networks, to pay a hefty, unreasonable amount of money and still end up in vendor lock-in, which limits them from making personal changes in the network architecture or using different equipment and software from other vendors. This generally means that operators do not have complete control over the network, which they have paid for. To tackle this challenge, a new concept called Open RAN has recently emerged, which has attracted s