On October 20, the inaugural OCUDU Ecosystem Developer Summit lands at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, bringing together open source pioneers, wireless communications leaders, and researchers to shape the future of 5G and 6G. Beyond network building, attendees will dive into hands-on code contributions and real-world deployments of this field-proven, carrier-grade stack. Below, we preview the high-impact demos and poster sessions taking over the event.
Throughout the summit, the Foyer will host dedicated exhibition blocks featuring dozens of cutting-edge projects under one roof. Attendees can experience live demonstrations on military-grade hardware, precision-agriculture deployments, dynamic spectrum sharing, and an ns-3 digital twin platform for ISAC networks, alongside breakthroughs in AI-native testbeds, network slicing, and field-hardening tools.
In this blog we share some of the demos and poster sessions we think you should check out at the event.
Check out the complete schedule here
Register for the OCUDU Developer Summit here
Hardening OCUDU for the Real World
Scaling OCUDU Deployment and Orchestration with O-RAN Based O-Cloud Best Practices
Chris Wheeler (Red Hat) and Nils Fürste (SRS) demo end-to-end 5G orchestration on Red Hat OpenShift, with carrier-grade OCUDU components carrying live user traffic. If you’ve ever wondered how to run OCUDU at scale with GitOps instead of duct tape, this is your session.
Live Demonstration: OCUDU on Military-Grade Equipment
Caleb McKinney (Lockheed Martin) brings a full CMOSS/SOSA-compliant 3U OpenVPX chassis running OCUDU, complete with real-time 5G transmission and multi-user connectivity – all in a sub-300W footprint. Come see how OCUDU holds up when it has to survive the tactical edge.
Hardening OCUDU with Automated O-RAN Security Testing
Wilfred Luiz (VIAVI) shows how O-RAN Security Test Specifications get translated into repeatable, evidence-driven automated workflows against real O-CU/O-DU functions – turning security validation from a manual chore into something you can run in CI.
MCP Enabled RAN Security Testing with RAN Tester UE
Charles Ueltschey (Mississippi State University) brings agentic security testing to life: LLM agents planning and executing SSB spoofing, protocol robustness tests, and multi-stage attack campaigns against a live OCUDU gNB, with an analyst kept in the loop the whole time.
Hardening OCUDU for the Field: Automated Deployment, Timing Compliance, and Autonomous Fault Recovery
In this poster, Narayana Indukuri and Selvaganesan Murugesan (Dell) detail field deployment practices for OCUDU on COTS hardware, covering automated bring-up, O-RAN Class C timing compliance, and multi-vendor RU interoperability. Features fault-detection plugins for autonomous cell recovery alongside slot-level field-debug tooling.
AI-RAN and AI-on-RAN
AI-RAN dApps for OCUDU: What Runs Today and What’s Still to Be Decided
Matt Pennybacker and Tim O’Shea (DeepSig) load a neural receiver, an ML scheduler, and an ISAC sensor into a running OCUDU stack carrying live traffic on a CUDA-accelerated L1 – signed, shadowed, activated at a slot boundary, and rolled back without a cell outage. If you’re building AI-RAN algorithms, this is where you find out exactly where your code plugs in.
EdgeRIC for Real-Time AI-Driven Optimization and Control over OCUDU
Srinivas Shakkottai, Ushasi Ghosh, and Woo-Hyun Ko bring jBPF-based in-RAN telemetry together with EdgeRIC’s real-time control loop, dynamically tuning buffer and queue sizes to cut latency for live applications.
RAN-Aware AI Task Offloading to MEC with WebAssembly and OCUDU
Alireza Ebrahimi Dorcheh (Clemson) shows a Near-RT RIC xApp combines OCUDU E2SM-KPM measurements with application demand and MEC resource state to determine which AI tasks should execute at the MEC and which should remain in the cloud.atch the service move without the UE ever noticing.
AI-Native RAN with OCUDU: An Open Research Testbed
Vipin Rathi and Kriish Sharma (Ramanujan College) demonstrate a flexible, multi-core, multi-radio AI-native RAN testbed built around OCUDU, a great one to visit if you’re looking to start your own AI-RAN research program.
xFormer Assisted Multi-Site Scheduling with Inter-Cell Coordination
Abdullah AL Safi (Virginia Tech / SoftBank) brings Transformer-assisted scheduling to multi-cell PRB allocation on OCUDU, aiming to cut inter-cell overlap and boost throughput for cell-edge devices.
“At-Scale, Real-World Physical AI for Precision Agriculture using OCUDU and ARA”
Taimoor Islam (Iowa State University) runs live on the ARA wireless living lab, with an OCUDU gNB serving a scouting drone doing real-time weed detection, and a dashboard that lets you turn the knobs on interference and power control yourself and watch detection accuracy respond.
Sensing Is the New Signal
Coordinated ISAC for UAV Detection on an OCUDU-Based Testbed
Chen Chen and Xuan Chen (George Mason University) turn two coordinated OCUDU-based 5G nodes into a pseudo-monostatic sensing system that tracks drones using standard NR waveforms – no dedicated radar hardware required.
Real-Time Sensing-Privacy Control for OCUDU at the PHY Layer
Also from Xuan Chen (GMU): every OCUDU deployment doubles as a radar illuminator whether you like it or not. This demo shows a live, keyless phase-obfuscation technique in the DU’s lower PHY that can toggle between an authorized view and a passive sensor’s, with a fan on a table proving it works.
An ns-3 Digital Twin Platform for OCUDU-Based ISAC Networks
In this poster, Mohammad Reza Fasihi (GMU) demonstrates a low-cost ns-3 digital twin framework integrated with Dockerized OCUDU software to model radio environments and evaluate object detection in ISAC networks. Supports reinforcement learning evaluation and enables testing beyond physical testbed constraints.
Testing, Testbeds, and Emulation Without the RF Headaches
Real-Time Multi-Cell Channel Emulation for OCUDU-Based 5G Testbeds
Simeon Wuthier (NIST) connects multiple OCUDU cells and multiple UEs through a GNU Radio / ZeroMQ channel emulator, letting you study multi-cell handover and cross-stack interoperability without ever touching an antenna.
Developing Trajectory-Aware Handover with OCUDU on POWDER
Dustin Maas (University of Utah) walks through the DRIVE-SAFE project’s use of OCUDU on the POWDER open testbed to build and test trajectory-aware handover for teleoperated and autonomous driving.
Knowing What Regressed: Run Comparison for the OCUDU Test Report
Craig Brennan and John Keeney (Ericsson Software Technology) show how they took OCUDU’s rudimentary test reporting and gave it persistent run history and run-to-run comparison – without needing a database. A quieter demo, but one every OCUDU maintainer will want to see.
AI-Enabled O-RAN Interoperability Testing
In this poster, Chen Chen (GMU) presents an AI-driven framework for testing O-RAN interoperability on an OCUDU-based 5G SA testbed. Uses automated test orchestration and Transformer-based analysis to streamline test selection and improve diagnostic accuracy.
Designing a Performance Test Bed for Detailed Hotspot Analysis of Commercial Servers Using vTUNE
This poster, presented by Moojan Kamalzadeh and Linqi Xiao (UT Dallas), covers UT Dallas OpenLab’s commercial-grade testbed setup for server optimization using the Intel vTUNE analysis tool. Details baseline high-speed interface connections across the OCUDU oDU, oCU, and core network.
Extending the Stack
Time Sensitive Network Integration for OCUDU
Thanh Long Le and Nguyen Thanh Tam (SUTD) bring deterministic, low-jitter TSN traffic support to the OCUDU gNB – NGAP, F1AP, Configured Grants, and a TSN AF implementation in Open5GS, all working together live.
Slice on Demand: Enabling Automated End-to-End Network Slicing as a Service in OCUDU
Rafael Lawisch (Unisinos) demonstrates an OCUDU network that creates a new slice on the fly instead of rejecting an unrecognized S-NSSAI, driven entirely through the E2 interface.
Enabling dApps for OCUDU with the E3 Interface
Ravis Shirkhani, Angelo Feraudo, Michele Polese, and Hai Cheng (Northeastern University / zTouch Networks) deploy an E3-enabled OCUDU instance on OpenShift with a single declarative action, then hot-swap a live I/Q spectrum-sensing dApp without ever restarting the gNB.
Dynamic Spectrum Sharing with an OCUDU-Based Open 5G RAN
Zachary Smith, Stephanie Demers, Alex Lackpour, and Dominic Catena (ANDRO Computational Solutions / Peraton Labs) show PRB blanking, cell reconfiguration, and cell evacuation working together to protect incumbent spectrum users while keeping OCUDU’s RAN adaptive.
Ground the Next Generation of Contributors
5G LAB KIT: Using OCUDU for Training and Education
Tiago Alves (Allbesmart) packs an OCUDU gNB, a USRP B206mini, and a Quectel 5G UE into a network-in-a-box, paired with a 42-hour lab manual mapped to 3GPP specs. A great stop if you’re thinking about how to get students and new contributors hands-on with OCUDU fast.
Join the OCUDU Developer Summit and help shape the future of open, software-defined RAN
Twenty demos, four posters, one common thread: this is what happens when an open-source RAN stack becomes a platform people actually build on.
Register to join us and come prepared with questions – every one of these teams is there specifically to talk shop, debate design choices, and hear where your use case doesn’t quite fit yet. See you on the demo floor.
Register for the OCUDU Developer Summit here