ACCoRD

NTIA-funded center for Open RAN testing, interoperability, and commercialization

ACCoRD — Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments — is an NTIA-funded effort to build the testing and R&D capacity that Open RAN needs to reach commercial scale. Open RAN’s promise is a multi-vendor, software-defined mobile network, but operators will only adopt it once they can trust that components from different vendors interoperate, perform, and stay secure when combined.

The project stands up a testing, evaluation, and R&D center focused on exactly those questions, and brings together U.S. carriers (AT&T and Verizon), consulting international carriers (NTT DOCOMO and Reliance Jio), and American Open Testing and Integration Centers. Much of the at-scale, real-world validation runs through the ARA OTIC at Iowa State.

My work centers on Open RAN integration and performance testing on the ARA platform that underpins ACCoRD’s evaluations.