The Linux Foundation announced the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation on March 3, 2026, at MWC 2026, uniting industry leaders like DeepSig, AMD, AT&T, Ericsson, Nokia, NVIDIA, SoftBank, SRS, and Verizon to advance open-source centralized unit (CU) and distributed unit (DU) software for 5G and early 6G radio access networks (RAN). Originating from U.S. government funding via the National Spectrum Consortium and Pentagon's FutureG Office, the initiative transitions a proven software stack into neutral governance, enabling interoperable, AI-native Open RAN deployments with features like spectrum sensing and neural receivers.
The OCUDU platform builds on the Software Radio Systems (SRS) 5G CU/DU solution, previously selected for government-backed development. DeepSig, a founding member specializing in AI for wireless communications, contributes expertise in AI-RAN, hardware acceleration (including NVIDIA GPUs), neural receivers, neural scheduling, and AI-native air interfaces. An initial release is available now, supported by a three-year funded program between DeepSig and SRS to expand capabilities for advanced 5G, early 6G, and accelerated compute.
The foundation provides an open reference platform, integration tooling, and continuous validation environments to reduce Open RAN fragmentation and enable production-grade deployments. It shifts from government-led efforts to vendor-neutral collaboration, inviting operators, vendors, cloud providers, and researchers.
Founding industry leaders include AMD, AT&T, DeepSig, Ericsson, Nokia, NVIDIA, SoftBank, SRS, and Verizon. Among 21 general members are 1Finity, Aalyria, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco, Red Hat, T-Mobile, and others. Participating universities and research institutions include Georgia Tech, MITRE, Rice University, UC San Diego, University of Texas at Austin, and more, focusing on next-gen PHY/MAC, AI optimization, security, testing, and energy efficiency.
"OCUDU creates the foundation for a more open and software-driven RAN ecosystem," said Jim Shea, CEO of DeepSig. Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, noted that the effort "aligns global stakeholders under an open, trusted and secure framework to power the next decade of wireless innovation" and advances interoperable CU/DU software. Chris Christou of Booz Allen Hamilton added, “This initiative will drive the future of open source AI-native 5G/6G RAN software." Thomas Rondeau of the Pentagon’s FutureG Office stated that shifting to Linux Foundation governance enables industry focus on innovation, with the initial stack set for GitHub publication in April.
