The gNB: CNS OCUDU

The gNB in a Racora cell, CU-CP, CU-UP and DU, is CNS OCUDU: Cognitive Network Solutions' downstream distribution of OCUDU, the open-source 5G CU/DU under the Linux Foundation. The relation is the one between a Linux distribution and the kernel: CNS OCUDU tracks upstream OCUDU and adds what an operated, AI-native RAN needs. Racora ships it as the gnb image (one image runs CU-CP, CU-UP and every DU) and the open5gs image of the Open5GS core provider, both built from the ocudu repository (trunk cns/main), published as a rolling :cns-main and immutable :vX.Y.Z tags; each Racora release pins one (release history).

Everything OCUDU documents, the protocol stack, its configuration, its features, applies unchanged and is documented at docs.ocudu.org. This section covers what CNS OCUDU adds and how Racora uses it.

What CNS OCUDU Adds

In one line each: the RANN-P measurement export that feeds the Intelligence Plane; runtime mobility configuration and the handover triggers on the running CU-CP (the cell lifecycle commands began here and are upstream OCUDU's now); a full FAPI cell lifecycle in the DU and the pci_set command surface; distributed tracing and log forwarding into Racora's collector; and a periodic metrics stream the dashboards count. The catalogue, item by item, is What CNS OCUDU Adds; the command payloads are the runtime commands reference; the telemetry it emits is the Span Schema.

How Racora Drives It

You never write a CU-CP or DU configuration file. The controller generates them from the NRCell resources: the CU-CP's runtime overlay (nrcell-cu-cp-config: the AMF address, every cell's identity, the mobility configuration, the administrative intent) and one DU configuration per cell (radio backend, cell parameters, the controller-assigned identity), and it applies mobility and administrative changes to the running CU-CP over the runtime commands. What you can declare is the NRCell API; how it reaches the gNB is How Mobility Reaches the CU-CP.