RU Emulator

RU emulator is a developer tool for testing the system in a controlled environment. It is a basic implementation of O-RAN FH interface. Its functions include verifying the timing of FH packets, checking the integrity of DL IQ samples and scheduling the transmission of UL IQ samples.

RU emulator has the following functions:

• Validation of timing of the transmitted packets by the DU (DL u-plane, DL c-plane, UL c-plane)

• Validation of the transmitted IQ samples or DL u-plane payload data

• Transmission of UL u-plane packets as a response to UL c-plane messages

The logic used by RU emulator to process received packets is displayed in the following figure. If the received packet is a U-plane, RU emulator will continue parsing the packet header to retrieve eAxC id, frame number, subframe number, slot id, startSym index, number of symbols, start PRB index and number of PRBs. It then compares the payload with the corresponding data included in the TV. If the received packet is a C-plane message for an UL packet, they are again parsed to extract the information for the UL data allocation same as for DL packets. RU emulator then transmits the UL u-plane data symbol by symbol and it uses accurate send scheduling function.

RU emulator needs the cuphycontroller configuration to obtain PCI address of the NIC interface, MAC address of the peer system, cell configurations, VLAN ID and eAxCid values for each cell. It also uses launch pattern file to understand the TDD pattern and the L1 configuration for each slot.

RU Emulator received packet processing