I'm excited to announce that we have joined the Industry Consortium for the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program to both contribute our ONAP expertise and to learn about cutting edge 5G research. The PAWR program is a critical organization for the US government's research initiatives in the field of advanced wireless technologies including 5G networks and beyond.
The PAWR Project Office (PPO) manages the $100 million public-private partnership and oversees the research platforms. The PPO is co-led by US Ignite and Northeastern University. It collaborates closely with the National Science Foundation, the wireless research community, local communities, and industry, in part through the Industry Consortium, in the design, development, deployment, and initial operations of the research platforms. PAWR has one testbed in Salt Lake City that's generally available, and two under construction — COSMOS in New York City and AERPAW in Research Triangle, North Carolina.
The Linux Foundation open source Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project is a popular automation software used by PAWR projects. As the leading ONAP distribution vendor, this is the main rationale for us joining PAWR. In addition to working on orchestrating, managing, and automating 5G Core and RAN projects, we are also looking forward to some advanced work around network slicing, O-RAN integration, AI/ML analytics, and management of edge computing applications — all using ONAP. We will contribute and learn at the same time!
If you are involved with PAWR and wish to collaborate with us, feel free to contact us. In the meantime, please join me on May 19th for a Linux Foundation webinar titled, "Integrating ONAP with a 5G Cloud Native Network". We will share the latest progress and a demo on the community based 5G Cloud Native Network + ONAP demo that is being developed in the OPNFV community.
