As you may know, there are two main components to RIC or RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) as below:
- Closed-loop control running at time scales of 10ms to 1s (Near-Real-Time, or Near-RT, RIC with xApps)
- Closed-loop control runs at time scales of 1s or more (non-RT RIC with rApps).
What about the real-time control loops operating at timescales below 10 ms? The answer is in nGRG’s recent report which explains the notion of dApps or distributed applications.
What is dApps?
dApps are distributed applications that complement and enhance existing xApps/rApps by allowing operators to implement fine-grained data-driven management and control in real-time at the O-CU-CP/UP and O-RAN Distributed Units (O-DUs).
What are the benefits of dApps?
The ability to execute intelligence in a unit co-located with O-CU-CP/UP and O-DUs opens up many fine-grained and new customizable and programmable inference and control loop capabilities, including beam management, scheduling profile selection, packet tagging, dynamic spectrum access, and QoS enforcement, among others.
What are the current limitations of dApps?
dApps address two critical limitations of the current architecture simultaneously– the lack of control loops with a periodicity faster than 10 ms, and the lack of interaction and programmability on the user plane.
What are the use cases of dApps?
There are many details mentioned in this report, with one interesting like Energy Savings in the O-DU, it’s recommended to read them from the report itself 🙂