Viavi Solutions Equips Picocom to Validate O-RAN Small Cell Base Stations

Viavi Solutions on Wednesday announced a collaboration with Picocom to provide test solutions for Open RAN base station components validation. These components will include chips, physical layers and protocol stack software. Notably, Viavi Solutions will provide the tech for small cell 5G networks compliant with O-RAN standards.

Viavi Solutions Provide Picocom with O-RAN Validation

The company said that despite worldwide 5G deployments, CSPs find it hard to meet the needs of multiple industries. The case has been especially difficult in the macro cell sites. Viavi further added that Picocom, with active involvement with the O-RAN Alliance, will advance small cell base stations. This will also allow both the companies to meet the demands of their respective customers.

Viavi said that its TM500 network tester can measure the total performance of a 5G network over multiple interfaces. These interfaces can include Open Fronthaul and RF through to the packet core. The networking company said that Picocom used the solution to create a test environment; this will ensure performance of small cell base stations in O-RAN networks.

Jonus Chen, VP, Greater China, Viavi, said, “as vendors across the industry develop open, cloud-native and disaggregated architectures, testing against user expectations of service quality is critical in order to accelerate adoption at scale".

He added, "5G network testing solutions from Viavi, combined with Picocom’s expertise in small cell base station components and software, empowers the stringent end-to-end interoperability testing and performance validation that is necessary to advance Open RAN deployments.”

Wu Jianwei, founding team member and director of system testing at Picocom, said, "the VIAVI TM500 is the ideal addition to the Picocom lab, enabling us to validate our forthcoming PC802 baseband system on a chip (SoC) in a complete 5G Open RAN system".

He added, "our in-depth collaboration will provide the market with high-quality and stable small cell networks, and help usher in 5G industry applications.”