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Ravis Shirkhani

Publications and source records attributed to Ravis Shirkhani.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Bringing dApps to OCUDU: An E3 Controller for Real-Time Open RAN Intelligence

Real-time control loops in Open RAN are increasingly colocated with the gNB, where dApps, i.e., programmable applications with sub-millisecond access to PHY- and MAC-layer signals, enable latency-critical use cases such as spectrum sharing, channel-aware scheduling, and integrated sensing. What turns dApps from a per-vendor mechanism into a portable component of the emerging AI-RAN ecosystem is the E3 interface: this interface defines how a dApp subscribes to RAN telemetry, receives indications, and issues control actions back to the RAN. To date, E3 has been implemented on OpenAirInterface and on NVIDIA Aerial; OCUDU, i.e., the Linux Foundation's open-source CU/DU project, has lacked a comparable E3 path. We close that gap with an open-source E3Controller for OCUDU, designed as a sidecar daemon so the E3 protocol stack, service-model logic, and dApp interactions live entirely outside RAN core processing, which is touched only through well-defined instrumentation hooks. We validate the controller with two reference service models, Spectrum and L1, that deliver O-RAN fronthaul I/Q samples to a spectrum-sensing dApp over a Foxconn RPQN 4800 radio unit. Our evaluation shows that the E3 path imposes no measurable throughput penalty on the OCUDU RAN, demonstrating that a real-time dApp/RAN interface is feasible on production-grade open RAN software.

cs.NI

RANalyzer: Automated Continuous RAN Software Evaluation and Regression Analysis

Software-driven O-RAN architectures enable rapid innovation through frequent, independent updates to virtualized components. However, attributing performance variations to specific software changes is challenging due to the stochastic nature of wireless systems, where channel conditions, interference, and hardware variability confound analysis. Traditional threshold-based monitoring and manual troubleshooting do not scale with modern software evolution. This paper presents RANalyzer, an automated test analysis framework that quantifies the performance impact of software updates beyond what can be explained by wireless channel conditions. RANalyzer combines LLM-assisted semantic extraction with residuals analysis. The first categorizes code changes by affected protocol layers and functional components, while the second provides insights on the effect of load, channel, or code changes on the test performance. We contribute an extensive dataset collected over more than two years of continuous over-the-air testing on an experimental O-RAN testbed, comprising over 8,600 automated tests across 69 releases of the OAI stack. By modeling expected performance and interpreting deviations as software-induced effects, we identify degraded instances attributable to code changes and correlate them with specific change categories. The framework can be integrated into CI/CD/CT pipelines for automated, continuous evaluation of software updates at scale.

cs.NI

TENORAN: Automating Fine-grained Energy Efficiency Profiling in Open RAN Systems

The transition to disaggregated and interoperable Open Radio Access Network (RAN) architectures and the introduction of RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) in O-RAN creates new resource optimization opportunities and fine-grained tuning and configuration of network components to save energy while fulfilling service demand. However, unlocking this potential requires fine-grained and accurate energy measurements across heterogeneous deployments. Three factors make this particularly challenging [...]. To address these challenges, we design the TENORAN framework, an automated measurement scaffold for fine-grained energy efficiency profiling of O-RAN deployments, and prototype it on a heterogeneous OpenShift cluster. TENORAN instruments an end-to-end deployment based on high-level specifications (e.g., gNB software stack and split options, traffic profiles), and collects synchronized performance metrics and power measurements for individual RAN components while the network is under controlled workloads including over-the-air traffic. Our experimental results demonstrate energy profiling of end-to-end experiments with xApps in the loop, energy efficiency differences between two RAN stacks, OpenAirInterface and srsRAN, in uplink and downlink, and core network power consumption trends.

cs.NI

AutoRAN: Automated and Zero-Touch Open RAN Systems

[...] This paper presents AutoRAN, an automated, intent-driven framework for zero-touch provisioning of open, programmable cellular networks. Leveraging cloud-native principles, AutoRAN employs virtualization, declarative infrastructure-as-code templates, and disaggregated micro-services to abstract physical resources and protocol stacks. Its orchestration engine integrates Language Models (LLMs) to translate high-level intents into machine-readable configurations, enabling closed-loop control via telemetry-driven observability. Implemented on a multi-architecture OpenShift cluster with heterogeneous compute (x86/ARM CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs) and multi-vendor Radio Access Network (RAN) hardware (Foxconn, NI), AutoRAN automates deployment of O-RAN-compliant stacks-including OpenAirInterface, NVIDIA ARC RAN, Open5GS core, and O-RAN Software Community (OSC) RIC components-using CI/CD pipelines. Experimental results demonstrate that AutoRAN is capable of deploying an end-to-end Private 5G network in less than 60 seconds with 1.6 Gbps throughput, validating its ability to streamline configuration, accelerate testing, and reduce manual intervention with similar performance than non cloud-based implementations. With its novel LLM-assisted intent translation mechanism, and performance-optimized automation workflow for multi-vendor environments, AutoRAN has the potential of advancing the robustness of next-generation cellular supply chains through reproducible, intent-based provisioning across public and private deployments.

cs.NI

Twinning Commercial Network Traces on Experimental Open RAN Platforms

While the availability of large datasets has been instrumental to advance fields like computer vision and natural language processing, this has not been the case in mobile networking. Indeed, mobile traffic data is often unavailable due to privacy or regulatory concerns. This problem becomes especially relevant in Open Radio Access Network (RAN), where artificial intelligence can potentially drive optimization and control of the RAN, but still lags behind due to the lack of training datasets. While substantial work has focused on developing testbeds that can accurately reflect production environments, the same level of effort has not been put into twinning the traffic that traverse such networks. To fill this gap, in this paper, we design a methodology to twin real-world cellular traffic traces in experimental Open RAN testbeds. We demonstrate our approach on the Colosseum Open RAN digital twin, and publicly release a large dataset (more than 500 hours and 450 GB) with PHY-, MAC-, and App-layer Key Performance Measurements (KPMs), and protocol stack logs. Our analysis shows that our dataset can be used to develop and evaluate a number of Open RAN use cases, including those with strict latency requirements.

cs.NI