# A Survey on Open Radio Access Networks: Challenges, Research Directions, and Open Source Approaches
## 4 Projects, Activities, and Standards Related to Open RAN
### Projects and Activities
TSC consists of member representatives and the technical leader from every WG, and this community represents both the members' side and the contributors' side in making decisions for every technical innovation made by WGs and FGs for the O-RAN Alliance. TSC is tasked to provide technical guidelines to every WG and FG, and to approve O-RAN's specifications, which were created by WGs and FGs based on members' approvals and publications [37]. Another important committee within the O-RAN Alliance is the MVP Committee (MVP-C). MVP-C is relatively new in O-RAN Alliance. MVP-C's main job is to prepare a MVP for O-RAN's WGs and the public. MVP will provide a priority list of work items and is used to coordinate WGs. MVP helps the O-RAN Alliance to work more effectively. For the public, MVP gives a clear understanding of O-RAN's roadmap and priorities. As mentioned earlier, the third FG, called OSFG, serves as the parent entity for OSC. OSC was founded in April 2019 as a collaboration between O-RAN Alliance and LF [16; 41]. This collaboration aims to support the creation of RAN's specific software. OSC is responsible for dealing with open source-related issues for O-RAN Alliance [37]. The software community is focused on aligning a software reference implementation with the O-RAN Alliance's Open RAN architecture and specifications [42]. Due to this focus, OSC's responsibilities are developing the open-source software, coordinating with other open-source communities, promoting the open-source software, and addressing wireless technology support for essential patents [37; 41; 42]. Figure 5: O-RAN Alliance’s WGs and their objectives. The workflow of OSC can also be seen in Figure 6. In the figure, we can see that OSC and the O-RAN Alliance work together in a loop. Firstly, 11 WGs contribute to making RAN specifications, architectures, and reference designs. These specs and architectures are checked to 3 GPP and 5G network standards. Besides checking to 3 GPP and 5G standard, these specs and architectures are also given to TIFG. TIFG tests whether OSC's software aligns with the specifications defined by the O-RAN Alliance. If there is any OSC code that works differently than the original specification, TIFG will request TOC to resolve these variance problems so that it aligns with the standard specification. After that, TOC prioritizes and negotiates with the O-RAN Alliance about solving these variance problems. The result of this negotiation is passed to the Requirements and Software Architecture Committee (RSAC). On the other hand, the O-RAN Alliance's WG1 also gives recommendations to RSAC about RAN specs or design features for inclusion in a particular release. Until this process, we can see that RSAC receives two things: negotiations from TOC and specs recommendation from WG1. When receiving the inputs, RSAC selects those recommendations based on available resources and software release timeline. Therefore, RSAC and OSC together develop their release planning. This release planning is implemented by OSC to produce the software releases every 6 months. OSC also interacts with other open source communities, as illustrated in the figure, such as Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Akraino, and Acumos AI. OSC contributes to these communities and at the same time, OSC also uses the software made by these communities. From the software release, the process starts again. Figure 6: OSC’s workflow. The O-RAN Alliance supplies further support to the Open RAN movement by providing OTICs and conducting the O-RAN Global PlugFest. OTTC provides a working laboratory environment for Open RAN E2E system testing, certification, and badging [43; 44]. OTTC's environment is designed to be vendor independent, open, collaborative, and secure. Currently, there are 15 OTTC labs around the globe [43] that usually held PlugFest to do interoperability test among vendors. PlugFest is a worldwide testing and integration event to demonstrate the O-RAN ecosystem [43].