A Survey on Open Radio Access Networks: Challenges, Research Directions, and Open Source Approaches

The open radio access network (RAN) aims to bring openness and intelligence to the traditional closed and proprietary RAN technology and offer flexibility, performance improvement, and cost-efficiency in the RAN deployment and operation. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the open RAN development. We briefly summarized the RAN evolution history and the state-of-the-art technologies applied in open RAN. The open RAN-related projects, activities, and standardization is then discussed. We then summarize the challenges and future research directions required to support the open RAN. Finally, we discuss some solutions to tackle these issues from the open source's perspective.