Open RAN just keeps moving faster – and nowhere is that more obvious than in the agenda for the first OCUDU Ecosystem Developer Summit. Over three days at the Boeing Auditorium, developers, operators, defense integrators, and academic researchers from around the world will gather to share how they’re pushing OCUDU – the carrier-grade, open source 5G stack – into production, into the field, and into entirely new use cases like radar sensing and AI-native network operations.
In addition to upcoming keynote announcements and a host of exciting demos featured in our next post, attendees can look forward to sessions led by community members sharing their real-world experiences, lessons learned, and vision for the path forward. Here’s a look at the sessions, grouped by theme, so you can plan your summit around what matters most to you.
Check out the complete schedule here
Register for the OCUDU Developer Summit here
Sensing Beyond Communication: ISAC on OCUDU
One of the most exciting threads this year is Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) – turning a 5G network into a sensor, not just a data pipe.
Building ISAC Into OCUDU: From MIMO Channel Access to End-to-End Cellular Sensing
Ish Jain, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
October 22, 2026 10:15am – 10:45am EDT, Boeing Auditorium
In this session, the speaker draws lessons from open source cellular prototypes, exposing per-antenna, per-subcarrier channel estimates, and mapping a path toward native ISAC support in OCUDU.
Monostatic 5G ISAC With OCUDU: Turning a 5G NR GNB Into a Radar Sensor
Oscar Venegas, Tiami Networks
October 22, 2026 11:10am – 11:40am EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A practical implementation of monostatic ISAC that reuses a standard 5G downlink waveform for radar sensing – with real-world results detecting people, vehicles, and drones. No dedicated radar hardware required.
Playing OCUDU Over Realistic Radio Channels – No Radios, Just a Consumer GPU Platform
Zhouyou Gu, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)
October 20, 2026 5:30pm – 6:00pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
An open source tool that replays realistic 3GPP channel models – fading, mobility, interference – on a gaming GPU at ~180x the speed of CPU emulation, so any developer can test OCUDU under real-world radio conditions.
Testing, Validation, and Hardening for Carrier-Grade
Open source is one thing; carrier-grade is another. A strong slate of sessions tackles how the community proves OCUDU is ready for real networks.
Evolving the OCUDU Retina Framework for End-to-End, Multi-Vendor Integration Testing
Justin Choquette, UNH Interoperability Labs; Tom Nadeau, Wind River
October 21, 2026 10:40am – 11:10am EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A roadmap to decouple OCUDU’s Retina test framework from internal processes, enabling vendor-neutral, end-to-end interoperability testing across Cores and O-RUs.
Benchmarking and Validating O-RUs on OCUDU: Lessons From a Vendor-Neutral APAC Validation Lab
Chi Yung (Jeff) Liu, ITRI
October 21, 2026 11:10am – 11:40am EDT, Boeing Auditorium
In this session, attendees will learn about reproducible, vendor-neutral benchmarking methodology and results from validating multiple commercial O-RU architectures against OCUDU.
Hardening OCUDU: A Test-Fix-Retest Model for Open O-RAN Compliance
Srinivas Sriram, Viavi Solutions
October 21, 2026 11:40am – 12:10pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
In this talk, an honesty-first testing mode will be presented – coverage tagged as verified vs. not observable, severity never downgraded, everything tested on real hardware – with over a hundred test executions run so far this year.
Validation of Multiple Commercial O-RU: Nuances and Opportunities With OCUDU Configurations
Linqi Xiao & Moojan Kamalzadeh, The University of Texas at Dallas
October 21, 2026 1:10pm – 1:40pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
What it actually takes to bring commercial O-RUs from factory-fresh to a stable, automated call-home with OCUDU – DHCPv6, CMPv2 enrollment, vendor profiles, and precision timing.
Security and Zero-Trust Architectures
For deployments where uptime is a safety issue, not just a customer-experience metric, security has to be designed in from day one.
Zero-Trust Private 5G With Security-Hardened and Validated OCUDU GNBs
Dora Boviz, Dell Technologies
October 21, 2026 5:05pm – 5:35pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A modular security-validation framework spanning the full trust chain – operator to SMO to gNB to O-RU – with a gap analysis against FIPS, DISA STIG, and Common Criteria that any OCUDU-based product can adopt.
An AI-Driven Security Operator (AISecOps) for OCUDU
Haohuang Wen, SE-RAN.ai
October 21, 2026 4:35pm – 5:05pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A framework that uses eBPF-based telemetry and a neurosymbolic diagnostic engine to give OCUDU deployments self-healing, self-defending capabilities – detecting and responding to runtime faults and security threats with an agentic AI operator.
From Lab to Field: Real-World Deployments
This is where OCUDU proves itself outside the test bench – in drones, tactical networks, and enterprise floors.
United States Marine Corps Expeditionary OCUDU Deployments
Lucas Vancina, United States Marine Corps; Andy Tran, Naval Information Warfare Center
October 21, 2026 3:40pm – 4:10pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
How MCTSSA and NIWC Pacific rapidly stood up a 5G gNB on commercial-off-the-shelf hardware during a spring 2026 military exercise in the Western Pacific – providing tactical-edge connectivity across an entire airfield.
From Lab to Field: Integrating OCUDU With Multi-Vendor O-RUs for Outdoor 5G Drone Deployments
Nguyen Thanh Tam, SUTD
October 21, 2026 1:40pm – 2:10pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
SUTD’s journey from multi-vendor O-RU interoperability testing to a fully operational outdoor Open RAN system supporting drone communications, plus AI-driven closed-loop optimization via SMO/RIC integration.
Adapting OCUDU for Test Range Operations
Achilles Kogiantis, Altio Labs
October 22, 2026 12:10pm – 12:40pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
What it takes to adapt OCUDU for the extreme distance, velocity, and mobility demands of airborne and high-speed unmanned test range operations.
Private 5G Networks: Enterprise Deployment and Distributed MIMO Architecture
Daniel Ping, REIGN Technology Corporation
October 22, 2026 11:40am – 12:10pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A look at Distributed MIMO on OCUDU for enterprise use cases – from tactical VR training to AI-powered smart manufacturing.
Production Readiness: Turning OCUDU Into a Product
Getting OCUDU running is the easy part – several sessions dig into what’s needed to actually ship, operate, and support it.
Working vs. Deployable: Building a Downstream Distribution on OCUDU
Michael Chiaramonte & Terence Li, Cognitive Network Solutions
October 20, 2026 2:00pm – 2:30pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A candid report from the integrator’s side: the missing pieces between a “working” CU/DU and a truly deployable, operable, hand-off-ready product – runtime configuration, cell-safe shutdown, M-plane clients, and more.
OpenWRT for RAN: Building an Opinionated, Deployable Open RAN Stack on OCUDU
Ilya Portnik, Dell Technologies
October 20, 2026 2:55pm – 3:25pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
This session draws a direct parallel to how OpenWrt turned the Linux kernel into a shippable appliance, proposing a community-maintained distribution layer around OCUDU with orchestration, zero-touch onboarding, upgrades, and packaging.
Productionizing and Hardening OCUDU for Enterprise and Defense Deployments
Rajesh Rasalkar, Sempre.AI
October 21, 2026 4:05pm – 4:35pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
In this talk, attendees can expect lessons from taking OCUDU from source code to deployed edge systems for mission-critical defense and commercial applications, including GNSS-denied timing and disconnected operations.
Scaling OCUDU Deployment and Orchestration with O-RAN Based O-Cloud Best Practices
Chris Wheeler – Principal Systems Engineer, Telco Emerging Communities Engineering, Red Hat
October 20, 2026 2:30pm – 3:00pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
This session will demonstrate how open-source Kubernetes platforms can enable seamless enterprise grade RAN deployment and orchestration at scale using O-RAN specifications, open-source tools, and GitOps practices. Red Hat will provide specific examples utilizing OpenShift with SRS presenting a broad range of options being developed by the ecosystem.
Performance, Hardware, and the Data Plane
For teams pushing throughput and efficiency limits, these sessions get into the silicon and the packet path.
OCUDU on AMD-Based Hardware Platforms: EPYC Performance, GPU Acceleration
Neerav Parikh, AMD
October 20, 2026 12:00pm – 12:30pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
Benchmarking and optimization work running OCUDU on AMD EPYC hardware, plus a proposed GPU acceleration backend for select processing paths.
DPDK-Based User-Plane Upgrade for OCUDU: Crypto Engine & N3/F1-U Transport Interfaces
Ved Prajapati & Vinay Revankar, Dell Technologies
October 21, 2026 2:40pm – 3:10pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A two-phase plan to replace throughput-limited crypto and transport paths with DPDK-based alternatives, aiming past the current 2–5 Gbps-per-core ceiling.
How Cohere Made OCUDU Deployment Ready for Achieving Spectral Efficiency
Prem Gopannan, Cohere Technologies
October 21, 2026 2:10pm – 2:40pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
How Cohere’s Universal Spectrum Multiplier adds codebook-free MU-MIMO scheduling on top of an OCUDU gNB via gRPC/E2SM-LLC.
Core Platform: PHY, Configuration, and Multi-RU Scale
The foundational engineering work that everything else depends on.
Update on the PHY and Roadmap
Xavier Arteaga, Software Radio Systems
October 20, 2026 11:30am – 12:00pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A review of recently shipped PHY features – including extended downlink MIMO and TTI bundling – plus a forward-looking roadmap.
Configuration Schema for OCUDU Apps
Franciszek Maroszek, Software Radio Systems
October 20, 2026 12:30pm – 1:00pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
A standardized, JSON Schema-based configuration description generated directly by OCUDU apps, unlocking validation, auto-completion, documentation generation, and better AI tooling support.
Scaling the OCUDU O1 Adapter for Multi-RU Support: From Single-RU Sidecar to Production-Grade Fleet
Vinay Revankar & Ved Prajapati, Dell Technologies
October 20, 2026 3:25pm – 3:55pm EDT, Boeing Auditorium
Six new modules that transform the O1 adapter from a 1:1 sidecar into a stateful, multi-target NETCONF dispatcher – a key unlock for production multi-RU deployments.
Join Us in Alexandria
Whether you’re hardening OCUDU for a defense deployment, building the next ISAC breakthrough, or just trying to get your first gNB on the air, the OCUDU Ecosystem Developer Summit is where this community does its best work – together, in the same room.
Register now for the OCUDU Ecosystem Developer Summit, October 20–22, 2026, in Alexandria, Virginia, and be part of shaping what’s next for open, carrier-grade 5G and 6G.