The diversification strategy of the UK Government aims to invest into addressing the challenge of diversifying the UK’s supply market for radio equipment. The R&D focus is the development of physical hardware, software/virtualised solutions, and testing with live networks to showcase the O-RAN capability to enable diversification of suppliers.

The DSIT dunde project, Proteus brings together a strong consortium of industry and academia to develop an Open RAN solution architecture that abstracts from the underlying hardware platform.

The University of Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab is part of the existing UK National 5G Test Network. This project builds on experience gained through Phase 0, Phase 1 and Phase 4 of DCMS investment, which created a large 5G footprint in the Bristol region. This has formed the UK's largest regional 5G Testbed for collaborative research and innovation. The University will transfer both technical and sector-specific application knowledge to the project consortium.

The PROTEUS project is creating an Open RAN open access Testbed at the centre of Bristol with an aim to support a wide variety of future technologies and use cases relevant to future mobile networks and specifically towards the evolution beyond 5G. Smart Internet Lab’s research contributes towards the system architecture and is deploying an Open RAN 5G Testbed to explore and maximize shared benefits from next-generation 5G digital infrastructure, specifically focusing on supply chain diversification for the UK telecommunications sector.

This research aims to address a key limitation of the current transmission network, its inability to scale to support the future O-RAN network demand, and rapid changes in the way internet services are consumed. The focus of this research is on-

• FPGA research and development for fronthaul distribution and synchronisation within an O-RAN architecture
  • FPGA Research and Development in Proteus focuses on providing secure transportation of O-RAN 5G Traffic and distributing the timing synchronisation information across the O-RAN deployment.
  • Time Shared Optical Network (TSON) has been offered as a large bandwidth, low latency, and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) enabled solution for accessing the full width of the network, while being able to meet the stringent timing requirements of 5G Fronthaul.
  • The FPGA solution provides reconfigurable hardware encryption offering optimum resource utilisation and adaptable security to meet the security and flexibility requirements of the O-RAN architecture. Furthermore,
  • Time-to-Digital Converter-based precise time synchronisation solution has been investigated to provide ~10 ps timing solution for the 5G Fronthaul hardware to provide synchronisation between the O-RU and O-DU.

• System integration as part of the Nomadic Node
• Network entity power measurement for DU module
• End-to-end packet service delivery testing
• Field trial at BT labs for long-distance backhaul
• Test and integration teams will innovate the way in which verification and validation test harnesses are developed and managed within the consortium, to enable code portability following CI/CD principles. Portability will be demonstrated at Bristol, Cambridge and Adastral Park partner sites. To guide this process profiles from the O-RAN Alliance will be used to ensure alignment with an Open RAN ecosystem, where refined and expanded by this project, they will be made available to contribute to the O-RAN Alliance/TIP or other ecosystems.