Biot, France 07 November 2022 – The OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA) is pleased to announce that NVIDIA has joined the non-profit’s strategic board.

With NVIDIA’s participation in the Alliance, wireless technology players and researchers — both industrial and academic — will see new products and services to foster growth in the 5G/xG arena. Users of OpenAirInterface (OAI) for many years have been leveraging OAI open-source code in the 4G/5G space.

“The support of NVIDIA Corporation for OAI and its joint platform development is a strong message and a testimony, not only of OAI as an enabler for innovation due to its widespread adoption among R&D teams, but also of the trust in the stability and maturity of the OAI software stack,”, said Irfan Ghauri, Director of Operations of the OSA. “The Alliance believes that the combination of the NVIDIA GPU technology and the OAI RAN stack will offer a unique and comprehensive tool for both academic and industrial researchers to develop and showcase AI/ML-driven 5G use-cases. This platform will further accelerate next- generation research and will in turn create opportunities for innovation with new and exciting products launched by startups as well as incumbent industrial players for network automation and management.”

“To foster an open ecosystem for creating and deploying advanced 5G networks, while enabling 6G research, the industry is moving toward a model that requires software-defined, disaggregated radio access networks, or RAN,” said Chris Dick, senior distinguished engineer, and architect at NVIDIA. “Working with OAI, NVIDIA is democratizing the telecommunications industry, which will speed time to innovation and create new efficiencies across networks.”

In collaboration with NVIDIA, OAI aims to provide an end-to-end 5G radio network gNB stack that is a powerful and flexible tool for wireless innovation. This platform comprises the OAI 5G Layer-2/Layer-3 (L2/L3) radio stack interfacing with the NVIDIA Aerial GPU- and NIC-accelerated Layer-1 (L1) to deliver an end-to-end gNB solution complete with a 7.2 split radio unit (RU). NVIDIA NIC technology provides FH eCPRI, SyncE and PTP timing capabilities.

Once this step is complete, the team will provide RAN interfaces to the OAI MOSAIC5G agile services platform to enable data monitoring and control of the RAN, thus enabling further advanced research avenues.

This platform has been designed to deliver the power of NVIDIA L1 and flexibility of the OAI open-source L2/L3 stack, allowing for showcasing of exciting new 5G and xG use-cases and technologies that are central to such future-generation networks. NVIDIA provides access to the CUDA source code for its Aerial SDK L1 stack, so together with the OAI L2+, this new system provides source extending from the physical layer to the core network. In the hands of designers, engineers, and researchers, this is the industry’s pioneering platform enabling high-end, cutting-edge use-case research, experimentation, and innovation.

About NVIDIA: NVIDIA, a leader in accelerated computing and AI technology, is playing a central role in the enablement of 5G RAN and future communication systems through its Aerial platform. L1 acceleration over GPU technology creates new opportunities in design, testing, and research of future-generation wireless systems.

NVIDIA and OAI are closely collaborating to accelerate and advance wireless research. NVIDIA GPU-accelerated Layer 1 and OAI gNB (L2+) and CN provide source code (C programming) for rapid prototyping and network deployment instead of time-consuming FPGA development.    The software-defined Aerial SDK runs on off-the-shelf GPUs, NICs and COTS servers without custom hardware nor any fixed function accelerators such as low-density parity check (LDPC) decoders.

For more information on NVIDIA Aerial, please visit: https://developer.nvidia.com/aerial-sdk

About the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA): The OSA was founded in 2014 by EURECOM, a research institute in the South of France. The Alliance manages and promotes OpenAirInterface (OAI) open-source software that offers 4G and 5G as well as Core Network stacks. Recently, agile service platforms under the label MOSAIC5G have also been added to the set of OSA’s offerings. The OAI software is used by many different organizations across the world for purposes of research and testing as well as for building blocks of systems for different 4G/5G use cases, a growing number of them industrial. Today, AMD, Firecell, Fujitsu, InterDigital, Meta Connectivity, NI, Nokia Bell Labs, NVIDIA, Orange, PAWR, Qualcomm, Sequans Communications, and Vodafone are represented on the Board of Directors of the OSA as Strategic Members.