OSS-driven local 5G diffusion--Tetsuya Iye(Doctor of Science, Department of Communications Engineering, Structural Planning Institute, Inc.
ODAIBA IX Core/Industrial Transformation (IX) Leaders
Leaders Transforming Industrial Technology (No. 10)

Tetsuya Iye, Department of Telecommunications Engineering, Structural Planning Laboratory, says, "Continuous development utilizing the extensibility of open source software (OSS) will accelerate the spread of local 5G." We asked him about the development process, the benefits of the OSS community, and the status of inquiries for OAIBOX. (TeleGraphic Editorial Department)

Kozo Keikaku Kenkyusho is a technical consulting firm that started out in the business of structural design systems for buildings. The firm's philosophy is to bridge the gap between universities and research institutions and the business world, and it operates as an independent knowledge engineering firm. field. One of the main features of our partnerships with leading overseas companies is that we promote cooperation aimed at providing good products and services through collaboration among engineers, rather than simply being a developer and distributor.

In the area of wireless, we have been providing router prototyping support and network simulation analysis using OSS as our core service since the early 2000s, and have been involved in radio prototyping services using overseas software-defined radio (SDR) devices since 2013, and have also been involved in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) Commissioned research (5G Advancement) led to our full-scale entry into 5G R&D, and we built a testbed for a millimeter-wave SDR communication environment. The OSS OpenAirInterface (OAI) was adopted as its software engine.

I was aware of free5G, or SD-RAN, SD-Core, etc. as OSS related to 4G/5G, but OAI had a solid management organization, a large community size and high update frequency, and a wide coverage of functions, including wireless access networks, core networks, and user terminals, In the OAI community, researchers, developers, and strategic members from around the world are working day and night across time zones to advance OAI development. From the user's point of view, if there is anything unclear in the use of OAI, we can get support from the community, and if we can provide some contribution to the community, we can get closer to the community and get cooperation and collaborative relationship with our colleagues around the world to develop OAI with both high quality and speed. 2019 After several years of struggling with OAI and accumulating knowledge since FY2022, Allbesmart LDA (Headquarters: Portugal, Founder: Paulo Marques, CEO: Jorge Ribeiro, hereinafter, Allbesmart) has released OAIBOX, an OAI-based 5G base station. We have therefore concluded an exclusive domestic distribution agreement with Allbesmart and will be the first company to sell OAIBOX in Japan.

OAIBOX is a service that provides an all-in-one package of open source 5G base stations for experimental and research use. The base station can be activated immediately after purchase, and all components necessary to verify its operation as a 5G base station are included in the package. In addition, although it is open source, you can expect the highest performance as an OAI 5G base station and stable base station operation without troublesome environment configuration and tuning. Although OAI is itself, it implements the complex 5G NR standard specification and is characterized by the visualization functions added by Allbesmart, parameter tuning for stability, and a textbook-level manual (Lab Manual) for the unwieldy OSS, lowering the barriers to entry into 5G.

We have received more inquiries than we expected immediately after we started offering the software, and we are particularly pleased that the automotive industry has requested the software. Continuous software updates are guaranteed with a maintenance contract, and the intuitive GUI "dashboard" automatically builds and deploys the latest source code, freeing users from troublesome operations. In reality, it is a DevOps environment created jointly by the user company and our company. To be honest, it is not a very inexpensive service, but I am confident that it will lead to a high-quality, low-cost, democratic service in the long run.

Since the Lab Manual is included with OAIBOX, users can deepen their technical understanding of 5G communications by following the contents of the text. This makes it ideal for use as a teaching material when teaching the mechanisms and operating principles of next-generation wireless communications to students and young engineers at universities and educational institutions. It can also be a shortcut to obtaining an experimental test station license and conducting experiments at OTA.

Local 5G is not as easy to operate as conventional Wi-Fi, and the fact that proprietary commercial products cannot be customized seems to be one of the barriers to product development and introduction. Therefore, we believe that if the environment can be built and operated as easily as possible based on customizable software like OSS, it will promote the development of applications and contribute to the expansion of the local 5G market.

As mobile communication systems continue to evolve toward 4G, 5G, and then 6G, the specifications of communication technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex. In line with this trend, the difficulty of developing hardware and software that can simulate 5G communications is also increasing, creating a situation where researchers and engineers who are responsible for next-generation wireless communications need to spend a lot of time and effort to build a platform for conducting research and development, and this OAIBOX I believe that the OAIBOX will help them to overcome this situation. (Talk)

The XGMF-ODAIBA IX (Industrial Transformation) Core will hold a workshop "Let's develop a cheaper and more democratic way to use local 5G, which is becoming more stable and affordable," on June 19, 2025 at Sekisui Chemical's Mizunase Innovation Center (Osaka). The workshop will be held at Sekisui Chemical's Mizunase Innovation Center (Osaka) on Thursday, June 19, 2025. Anyone can participate in the online broadcast via live streaming. For more information, please visitthis way (direction close to the speaker or towards the speaker)Please check from

(TeleGraphic Editorial Board)