Rakuten Mobile unveiled an innovation lab where it’s inviting other operators, vendors, and organizations to accelerate the development and standardization of open and virtualized radio access network (RAN) technologies.

The Rakuten Mobile Open Innovation Lab is available within the operators' already established Cloud Innovation Lab. Interested vendors, operators, or other organizations can remotely connect to the lab and in-house open vRAN verification equipment or work with Rakuten to have the operator build technology verification capabilities owned by partner companies.

Rakuten is also providing open RAN verification environments at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Engineering Nakao Laboratory campuses, which are remotely connected into the new innovation lab.

The innovation lab uses Rakuten Mobile’s virtualized network architecture, including disaggregated virtual distributed units (vDU) and disaggregated centralized units (vCU). This supports the remote testing and ability to set up verification capabilities in remote locations.

Equipment vendor Ericsson set up a similar 5G testing lab at one of its facilities in California. That work is with Intel on showing how cloud native principles can improve the performance and efficiency of cloud 5G RAN equipment.

The lab is also targeted at supporting Rakuten’s work with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo as part of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) Beyond 5G R&D Promotion Project. That project, which was established early last year, is focused on evolving the 5G standard to better support edge and far-edge applications.

Rakuten said the innovation lab will support trials using the vRAN intelligent controller (RIC) to optimize network design and operation. It’s also developing artificial intelligence (AI) applications for the RIC platform that can detect and predict traffic and anomalies in open vRAN deployments to improve network performance and stability.

Rakuten rival NTT DoCoMo is focused on similar efforts having recently struck a deal with equipment vendors Nokia, NEC, and Fujitsu to develop 6G technologies that tap into advanced networking and transmission capabilities. The work is targeted at networks that are expected to roll out beginning around 2030.