CCI, Virginia Tech to hold prominent roles in $42 million wireless project

The Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) and Virginia Tech will play an instrumental role in a new $42 million wireless innovation project announced by the U.S. Department of Commerce on Monday at the Virginia Tech Research Center — Arlington.

At the event, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Alan Davidson, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, U.S. Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, and industry leaders discussed open radio access networks (O-RAN), which promise to boost competition in a market dominated by a few players, spur innovation, and create jobs. 

“When the United States thinks about how …  (we’ll) meet the greatest challenges of the day, we fall back on core American values – openness, competition, innovation, and working with our allies,” Raimondo said. “That’s what O-RAN is about. We want to lead the world and outcompete the world, and to do that, we have to out-innovate the world.”

Funded by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 and administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund will invest $1.5 billion in the next decade to support the development of open and interoperable networks. Raimondo credited Warner with including O-RAN investment in the bill. 

The Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for the Open RAN Deployments (ACCoRD) Project is a consortium of U.S. carriers, foreign carriers, universities, and equipment suppliers. AT&T and Verizon will lead the project that was announced on Monday. 

The CCI xG Testbed, based at Virginia Tech in Arlington, will be the Washington, D.C., area home of a testing, evaluation, and research and development center dubbed Platform for O-RAN Testing, Orchestration, and Management with AI Control or POTOMAC. Aloizio P. DaSilva, CCI xG Testbed director, will lead POTOMAC. There will be another center based in the Dallas Technology Corridor.  

The xG Testbed is the largest and most advanced of its kind and also is an Open Testing and Integration Center (OTIC), an essential component in boosting advancements and competition in wireless mobile networks based on O-RAN. CCI’s OTIC is one of seven centers in North America and one of 17 in the world approved by the O-RAN Alliance. CCI’s test bed is adding an outdoor component, which will cover a 1.5-mile corridor on Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg Campus.

CCI researchers also are involved in a total of five projects funded under the Innovation Fund’s first call for proposals. It’s a result of work that began in 2020, said Luiz DaSilva, CCI executive director and Bradley Professor of Cybersecurity at Virginia Tech.

“CCI made an early strategic decision to invest in O-RAN that has positioned us with unique strengths to contribute to the Wireless Innovation Fund objectives,” DaSilva said. “When we talk about the CCI xG Testbed, the tangible part, such as the equipment, is the first thing that comes to mind, but our real strength lies in the expertise we developed and the researchers we have trained. The workforce, and the ability to constantly train new professionals, is the real asset.”

With AT&T and Verizon leading, ACCoRD’s industry partners include Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, Fujitsu, Mavenir, Dell Technologies, Intel, Radisys, Rakuten, Red Hat, VMWare by Broadcom, and Wind River Systems. Japanese telecommunications company NTT DOCOMO and India’s Reliance Jio are unfunded founding members of the consortium.