The two Japanese giants announce a further extension of their ongoing open RAN collaboration.

Anne Morris, Contributing Editor, Light Reading

June 22, 2021

3 Min Read
DoCoMo and NEC tackle RIC for open RAN

Japanese vendor NEC already has a pretty cozy relationship with Rakuten Mobile, the open RAN bad boy whose latest exploits include plans to expose the industry's pricing secrets.

NEC is of course also collaborating with the more established operators in Japan, including NTT DoCoMo. And DoCoMo in turn has long supported the ideals of open RAN technology. For example, the telco is a key player in the O-RAN Alliance and has been working with NEC since 2018 on testing open RAN technologies.

Figure 1: Good call: NEC and NTT Docomo are working together on the RAN Intelligent Controller. (Source: Tore F on Unsplash) Good call: NEC and NTT Docomo are working together on the RAN Intelligent Controller.
(Source: Tore F on Unsplash)

In June 2020, NTT and NEC entered into an alliance with the aim of developing and selling new internationally competitive products for 5G and beyond, including further accelerating the penetration of open RAN specifications.

In February, DoCoMo then spearheaded the 5G Open RAN Ecosystem and announced agreements with Dell Technologies Japan, Fujitsu, Intel, Mavenir, NEC, NTT Data, Nvidia, Qualcomm Technologies, Red Hat, VMware, Wind River and Xilinx. The broad aim here is "to globally accelerate" the development and deployment of open RANs.

Working on the RIC

Now, DoCoMo seems to have gone a step further: NEC has just announced that it is working with the Japanese telco on the joint development of a RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) – described as a central component of an open and virtualized RAN network.

According to NEC, the two companies are aiming to reduce RAN operational costs, improve performance, and reduce power consumption through the use of RIC. NEC also highlighted the use of artificial intelligence to allow "more sophisticated and efficient control of networks."

In a first step, the partners plan to focus on reducing the operating costs of RAN, such as automating base station settings. Next, their aim will be to improve the performance of RAN through measures that include reducing the power consumption of network equipment by "automatically and autonomously" optimizing radio resources.

Want to know more about Open RAN? Check out our dedicated Open RAN channel here on
Light Reading.

It appears that the RIC will be based on technology from NEC subsidiary Netcracker. NEC said Netcracker provides an open RAN domain orchestration solution that is aligned with the O-RAN Alliance service management and orchestration framework, including RIC functionality.

Looking ahead, DoCoMo, NEC and Netcracker said they plan to continue their RIC collaboration to "enable intelligent functionalities for accommodating various 5G use cases."

Other RIC collaborations are available: Nokia has announced public RIC trials with AT&T and China Mobile, for example; and VMware has previously said it is working with Deutsche Telekom on open RAN and RIC.

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— Anne Morris, contributing editor, special to Light Reading

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Asia

About the Author(s)

Anne Morris

Contributing Editor, Light Reading

Anne Morris is a freelance journalist, editor and translator. She has been working in the telecommunications sector since 1996, when she joined the London-based team of Communications Week International as copy editor. Over the years she held the editor position at Total Telecom Online and Total Tele-com Magazine, eventually leaving to go freelance in 2010. Now living in France, she writes for a number of titles and also provides research work for analyst companies.

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