Announced at the Mobile World Congress Barcelona (MWC) 2023, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) will launch a new O-RAN Asia & Pacific Open Testing and Integration Centre (OTIC) in Singapore. As part of Singapore’s S$70 million Future Communications R&D Programme (FCP) supported by Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF), the Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore will be co-located within SUTD’s Future Communications Connectivity Lab (FCCLab).
The new Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore will look to advance Singapore’s digital infrastructure capabilities and enable the next level of innovation in future communications and capabilities. It will establish a centre of excellence on the security, sustainability and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) aspects of Open RAN. With the addition of OTIC at SUTD’s FCCLab, the first 6G R&D lab in Southeast Asia will expand existing infrastructure and support holistic testing and integration activities for mobile networks and applications with both indoors and outdoors test environments. The centre in Singapore will also serve as part of the global OTIC networks and establish itself as the South-east Asia hub and gateway to the global Open RAN ecosystem.
The Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore located in the SUTD campus offers a secured, safe, and conducive environment for operators and vendors to collaborate, test and optimize vendors’ O-RAN solutions while ensuring each operator’s and vendor’s confidential information and IPRs are well protected as they operate in the OTIC lab facility either through on site or remote activities.
The Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore lab will be equipped with the following list of test equipment.
- Multi-UEs emulator (Keysight UeSIM)
- O-RUs emulator with embedded multi-UEs emulation (Keysight RuSIM)
- Mobile Core network emulator (Keysight CoreSIM)
- 3GPP Security Assurance Specifications (SCAS) test modules (Keysight O-RAN Security Test Suite)
- DDoS attacks emulator (Keysight O-RAN Security Test Suite)
- Cloud attacks emulator (Keysight O-RAN Security Test Suite)
- Vulnerability and Port Scanning solution (Keysight O-RAN Security Test Suite)
- Test Automation (Keysight Test Automation Framework)
- Test devices (handsets, CPEs etc.)
- Network switches
- Optical transceiver modules and breakout cables up to 100G
- Fiber optical network tap
- Timing and sync equipment GPS, PTP grandmaster etc.
The Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore plans to offer world-class testing services in a laboratory environment focusing in the following areas:
- Security testing of multi-vendors O-RAN solutions: this capability will be developed in three phases
- Phase 1: O-RAN recommended security testing (including gNB, O-DU, O-CU, Fronthaul Gateway, O-Cloud)
- Phase 2: Integrated testing for specific application vertical
- Phase 3: Advanced security testing for Near and Non-Real-time RIC / xApps / rApps / SMO
- Energy efficiency is a key sustainability goal for companies around the world. Singapore has charted its Net Zero future as it has committed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 with significant reduction in emissions by 2030. The Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore plans to enable testing and optimization of AI/ML enabled network energy efficiency and energy savings techniques for real world networks in its lab.
- Application verticals that are critical for Singapore and the region. Singapore is a world leader in maritime, and the continued growth of this industry is important for Asia Pacific region. The first vertical that our OTIC plans to focus on, hence, is the maritime vertical. There is a planned maritime operational technology testbed in SUTD and the co-location of these two labs in the same building in the SUTD campus will contribute to the development of testing and integration capability for this application vertical.
At launch, the Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore will be focusing on Security testing Phase 1 offering subsystem, interoperability and system testing capabilities for multi-vendors O-RAN solutions in its OTIC lab environment. O-RAN system under test can be characterized, tested and validated for their security capabilities with joint orchestration of multi-UEs and O-RAN network functions emulation and the security attacks, scan, and audit modules including:
- 3GPP Security Assurance Specifications (SCAS) TS 33.511, TS 33.117
- DDoS attacks
- Cloud attacks
- Vulnerability and Port Scanning
Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore plans to offer at launch security testing services and O-RAN Badging of E2E System Integration using O-RAN Security Requirements and Test Specifications specified by the O-RAN ALLIANCE Security Working Group 11 (WG11) and Testing and Integration Focus Group (TIFG) E2E Test Specification as the baseline. SUTD and Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore plan to collaborate with industry partners to research and develop additional test scenarios (attacks, scans, and audits) and cases gearing towards deployment readiness testing and DevSecOps.
Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore plans to host O-RAN PlugFests in the near future.
Asia & Pacific OTIC in Singapore plans to offer O-RAN Certification of Conformance and Badging of Interoperability in the future as O-RAN ALLIANCE continues to evolve its technical and test specifications in the areas of Security, Energy Efficiency and Savings and optimized support for Application and Industry Verticals.