Bringing together innovation and collaboration in Open RAN: the second xG-ALOE Plugfest took place from September 17 to 25 at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin.
Throughout the event, participating partners tested a wide variety of O-RAN features in practical, industry-relevant scenarios. The Plugfest provided an opportunity to validate the technical readiness of their solutions, assess multi-vendor interoperability, and prepare results for public reporting. The test programme reflected the technical priorities identified by campus network operators.
All tests were carried out in a vendor-neutral environment using multiple test tools and partially automated procedures where possible. The test cases and methods were jointly developed with the participating partners ahead of the event.
Among the solutions showcased was the Security Testing Platform for xG Software developed by the University of Passau. This platform assesses software components, vulnerabilities, and deployment configurations with a particular focus on O-RAN environments. It aims to enable transparent, reproducible and auditable security assessments by combining algorithm-based vulnerability detection with targeted AI support.
Open Radio Systems contributed to the Plugfest’s hardware-acceleration scenario, focusing on performance and energy efficiency in Open RAN deployments. The team benchmarked the Intel ACC100, AMD T2 and ORS Aurora accelerators against an AVX-512 CPU baseline across various scenarios, including OAI and OCU/DU open-source stacks. The evaluations examined CPU offload, energy consumption, throughput and overall system resilience.
Together, these activities illustrate how security testing, interoperability and hardware acceleration can contribute to more secure, efficient and resilient next-generation open network architectures.