VIAVI and Broadcom Work Together to Expand RIC Testbed

VIAVI Solutions introduced advanced and additional capabilities of a collaborated Testbed as a Service (TBaaS) with VMware, which was recently acquired by Broadcom. The TBaaS merges the VIAVI TeraVM RIC Test with VMware’s RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) to make a Digital Twin for the performance benchmarking and evaluation of applications. The TBaaS has been “validated with multiple app vendors and consortiums, including at the i14y Lab, underscoring expanding industry demand due to its ability to speed deployment and agility, both of which are increasingly urgent in today’s network environments," VIAVI said when announcing the capability advancements.

Through Digital Twin modeling a virtual model of a network is created in the lab, giving service providers the ability to quickly and effectively model network behaviors and disturbances.

VIAVI and VMware’s TBaaS gives RIC applications the ability to make simulations with realistic data. VIAVI added that it "provides geolocation intelligence and xApps/rApps, with real RAN data over the VMware RIC platform. This allows a CSP to capture information once and emulate it with multiple other applications, reducing the overhead of repeatedly capturing, processing and transmitting data.”

On top of this, the RAN Scenario Generator within the TeraVM RIC Test provides the opportunity to developers and operators to model scenarios in the lab, either before a launch or in environments where large amounts of real data are unavailable. The company concluded, “Data captured can also be used for training AI/ML models.”