Demo: Enabling Interoperability of dApps over Heterogeneous Radio Access Networks

Abstract

The Open RAN paradigm splits the cellular architecture into disaggregated functions joined by openly specified interfaces, and adds programmable control through the RICs attached over the E2 interface. Those controllers, however, close their loops no faster than tens of milliseconds, leaving out inference-driven decisions that must be taken inside the RAN at per-slot granularity. dApps close that gap, reaching this timescale and exchanging user-level and RF measurements with the RAN node over the E3 interface [2]. While many RAN vendors have started embracing E3, no standardization body has yet formalized it. Every stack hosting dApps therefore implements the E3 Application Protocol (E3AP) itself and revises it as the protocol evolves. Endpoints that disagree on the wire cannot talk, so a dApp proven on one deployment must be re-engineered for another, despite unchanged inference logic. LibE3 (https://github.com/wines lab/libe3) answers this with one vendor-neutral realization of the E3AP serving both the RAN and dApp sides, with transport and encoding chosen by configuration rather than fixed in code. This demo shows a libE3-powered dApp serving multiple RANs and processing data from both stacks in parallel. Building on the publicly available NVIDIA Aerial framework, we implement the E3AP transport with libE3 and attach the dApp to two Next Generation Node Bases (gNBs), one on OpenAirInterface [2] and one on OCUDU [1]. Because both expose the same Service Model (SM) contract, the dApp attaches to each without changing its logic, and both stream telemetry to it, as Fig. 1 shows.