NEC to jointly develop RIC for advanced operations of Open RAN with NTT DOCOMO

NEC's subsidiary, Netcracker, provides an Open RAN Domain Orchestration solution aligned with the O-RAN Alliance Service Management and Orchestration framework, including RIC functionality developed by Netcracker. The solution is based on Netcracker's Digital OSS (operations support system), built from its wealth of experience domestically and internationally, and brings together the orchestration, real-time OSS, and advanced analytics required to fully automate RAN domain operations, from planning and design, to activation, monitoring, and optimization. With end-to-end visualization and optimization, the solution maximizes RAN performance and improves business KPIs for service providers.

Since 2018, NEC and DOCOMO have been working jointly to verify and test Open RAN technologies and promote their use. In June 2020, NTT and NEC entered into a capital and business 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.

NEC and Netcracker will continue to develop RIC in collaboration with DOCOMO in order to enable intelligent functionalities for accommodating various 5G use cases. Furthermore, the companies aim to promote innovation in support of an ecosystem that solves social issues through deployment of diverse 5G Open RAN solutions throughout the world. This includes intelligent solutions utilizing and integrating the technologies and expertise related to networking and AI owned by each company.

MWC Barcelona 2021 online exhibition:
NEC is providing an online demonstration showcasing the functionalities and features of RIC. The demonstration shows how user throughput can be improved and how power consumption can be reduced by applying RIC to Massive MIMO (Note 2), a key technological element for advanced 5G, and automatically optimizing beam configuration.