Balancing traffic loads among cells, cell groups, and bearers while achieving low-latency and high quality of service isn’t easy. The spectrum can go underutilized and handover failures rise. Traffic steering can help by routing, balancing, switching, and splitting traffic across diverse, multi-access radio networks.
The RIC can implement traffic steering based on a current view of the network and applying AI/ML algorithms for improvements. xApps can tell the RIC to steer subscribers to another cell or frequency if their Quality of Experience will be improved.
To ensure that the xApps work optimally and don’t conflict with each other, a repeatable environment where the RIC and the Apps can be trained and validated in different scenarios is needed. A RAN emulator can emulate the UEs and recreate anomalies on purpose to test if the Apps can resolve the issue.
The VIAVI RIC Test Solution continuously sends statistics, KPIs and counters across the E2 interface to the RIC, which is housing the xApps to test them. This allows to gather full data on how the RIC and xApps perform against target KPIs.
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Video: Near RT RIC Traffic Steering Demonstration
Case Study:
Traffic Steering
The VIAVI Geolocation App exposes geolocated data to rApps and xApps, including insights on spatial distribution and dynamics for subscribers, devices, network, and service performance. It enables the RIC to make better decisions in many Near-RT and Non-RT optimization and automation use cases, including traffic steering.
Traffic Steering
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