The Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things (WIoT) at Northeastern University has established an Open Testing and Integration Centre (OTIC) in Burlington, Massachusetts. The OTIC has been approved by the O-RAN ALLIANCE with the official designation of “North American OTIC in the Boston Area (Northeastern University)” after a review of criteria and guidelines.
The OTIC will provide testing equipment and services to validate disaggregated base stations and radio access network (RAN) intelligent controllers (RICs), including custom applications, i.e., xApps and rApps. Besides serving commercial interests, the OTIC will be a resource and knowledge hub for the U.S. government, including through programmes such as the Open6G Hub.
The new Northeastern OTIC builds on facilities and capabilities available in the Open6G centre, which will be expanded with dedicated testing equipment. Here are some of the capabilities:
- Large-scale experimental wireless testbeds – Colosseum, funded by the National Science Foundation, is billed as the wireless network emulator, with 256 software-defined radios and 25 server racks equipped with programmable GPUs (graphics processing unit), FPGAs (field programmable gate array) and orchestration tools. Arena is the over-the-air complement to Colosseum, which hosts a fully automated private 5G network.
- FCC innovation zone – The OTIC is part of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Innovation Zone, which covers multiple 5G bands in the Northeastern University campuses in Boston and Burlington, MA. This allows over-the-air testing of O-RAN systems in a variety of different environments.
- Diverse 5G RAN deployments: The OTIC encompasses multiple 5G RAN deployments, including commercial/proprietary as well as Open RAN products such as 5G user equipment (UE), core networks, and a programmable 5G O-RAN testbed with over 10 base stations in the indoor Arena testbed. This infrastructure facilitates testing and integration of xApps and rApps against various RAN implementations in emulated and over-the-air environments.
- Testing facilities: The OTIC is co-located with a large outdoor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) testing facility to explore use cases related to drone mobility and with an anechoic chamber designed to conduct interference-free radio device testing.
The Northeastern OTIC has been launched in partnership with AT&T, Verizon, and DISH. The WIoT industry consortium, which has been supporting this effort, counts about 20 vendors, operators, over-the-top system integrators, and small businesses in the telecom space.
“Northeastern’s Open6G is at the forefront of innovation in Open RAN testing, architectures, algorithms, software, and experimentation. Together with our partners, we are creating an innovation and testing ecosystem that will continue to serve the federal government, industry, and academia,” says Tommaso Melodia, director of Northeastern’s Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things.
The OTIC will provide services to clients through remote and physical access. It is hosted in a 4,600 square feet facility with collaborative and experimental space, including conference rooms, offices, storage, and data centre spaces equipped with dedicated cooling, power supply, and networking infrastructure.
For testing inquiries, please contact: open6g.otic@northeastern.edu
More information on the OTIC portal click here.
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