Glossary

ANR. Automatic neighbor relations: the Intelligence Function that discovers neighbor cells from measurements and adds them to a cell's spec.neighbors; status.neighbors records each applied relation's source, anr for these and manual for the ones an operator declared. See How Decisions Become Network State.

Capabilities file. /etc/racora/node-capabilities, written by the provisioner's validator on a host: rf_ready, gpu_ready and fronthaul_ready, plus the kernel, the isolated CPUs and the fronthaul NIC it found. The platforms turn it into the node labels.

Control node. The one node that runs the CU planes, the in-cluster core and the two controllers; on the k3s platform the server, and the node with the GPU. See Requirements.

Controller. A process that watches resources and brings the network to match them. Racora runs two in racora-system: racora-controller for NRCell and racora-core-controller for Subscriber. See Racora Architecture.

Core provider. The 5G core as a pluggable module of the network layer: one directory per provider (cores/<name>/) selected with INSTALL_RACORA_CORE or global.core.provider. Racora ships open5gs (the reference core, in the cluster) and external (an AMF you run). See How Core Providers Work.

CU-CP, CU-UP. The control-plane and user-plane halves of the gNB's centralized unit, two of the three CU planes in centralized-unit. Both come from CNS OCUDU (the gNB). The CU-CP holds the logical cells, terminates F1-C from every DU, E1 from the CU-UP and NGAP to the core, and answers the runtime commands.

CU-IP. The Intelligence Plane, the third CU plane: the process that holds the substrate and runs the Intelligence Functions. It needs an NVIDIA GPU and serves decisions to the controller over Arrow Flight. See the Intelligence Plane.

CU planes. The three centralized-unit processes in centralized-unit: CU-CP, CU-UP and CU-IP. They are dormant until the first cell and pin to the control node.

Decision. One recommendation an Intelligence Function emits over RANN-D: a target cell, a field (target_field), a recommended value, a reason and a confidence, plus its preconditions and, optionally, the trace context of the span that produced it. The controller decides whether and how to apply it. See How Decisions Become Network State.

Dormant. The state of the CU planes with zero replicas. The chart ships CU-CP, CU-UP and CU-IP at replicaCount: 0; the controller scales them to one when the first cell is declared and back to zero when the last cell is deleted.

DU. The gNB's distributed unit: one per cell, generated by the controller as a Deployment in distributed-unit from the cell's NRCell, driving one radio.

F1, E1, NGAP. The interfaces of the gNB: F1 between each DU and the CU-CP (F1-C on port 38472, F1-U to the CU-UP), E1 between the CU-CP and the CU-UP (port 38462), and NGAP between the CU-CP and the core's AMF (port 38412). All three run over SCTP.

fronthaul-ready, gpu-ready, rf-ready. The three node labels of the node contract, racora.io/rf-ready, racora.io/gpu-ready and racora.io/fronthaul-ready, set from a host's /etc/racora/node-capabilities. A real-radio DU schedules only on rf-ready, CU-IP only on gpu-ready; no shipped workload selects fronthaul-ready. See The Node Contract.

gNB, CNS OCUDU. The gNB is the 5G base station, split into the CU-CP, the CU-UP and one DU per cell. Racora's gNB is CNS OCUDU, CNS's downstream distribution of OCUDU. See The gNB (CNS OCUDU).

gnbId. The identity of the gNB, one per CU, set by the chart (racora-controller.gnbId, default 411) and shared by every cell under it.

gnbDuId. The identity of a cell's DU toward the CU-CP; assigned by the controller, one DU per cell, so it tracks the cell's sector id. See Cell Identity.

GPSDO. The GPS-disciplined oscillator of a USRP B210: with clockSource: gpsdo the DU waits for a GPS lock before it starts, which aligns several cells in time. A single cell can run on the internal clock. See Connect a Radio.

HelmChart, HelmChartConfig. On the k3s platform the RAN is delivered as a k3s HelmChart resource written by the installer, which k3s's helm-controller installs as the helm release racora. A HelmChartConfig of the same name in kube-system is the operator's place to override values: the installer never writes it, reads it in its pre-flight before an upgrade, and a ran-scope uninstall deletes it. See k3s.

Installer package. The release asset racora-installer-<tag>.tar.gz: the installer script with its platforms/, node-provisioning/ and cores/ modules as they shipped with that release. The command served at get.racora.io downloads and runs it, and an existing-cluster install takes its platform and core files from it.

Intelligence Function. A function that reads the substrate and emits decisions: PCI assignment and ANR (automatic neighbor relations) ship with CU-IP. Writing another one is the CU-IP extension point. See the Intelligence Plane.

NCI. The NR Cell Identity, the cell's global identity within the PLMN: the gnbId and the cell's sector id combined. The controller derives it and records it in the cell's status as hex (nci) and decimal (nciDecimal); runtime commands take the decimal form.

Network identity. The PLMN, tracking areas and slices the network serves, declared once in global.network (plmn, tacs, slices), rendered into the core and into the CU-CP's NG Setup, and required of every cell. See Configure the 5G Core.

Node contract. What a host must provide for real radios and GPUs, expressed as the three labels above, the device-plugin resources and the host requirements every platform binds its own way. See The Node Contract.

NRCell. The custom resource (nrcells.racora.io/v1alpha1) that declares one cell: band, ARFCN, bandwidth, PLMN and TAC, the radio, neighbors and mobility. The controller materializes it as a DU and a CU-CP configuration. See the NRCell API.

Offline bundle. A directory assembled by scripts/fetch-bundle.sh (in the repository at the release tag) from a release's assets, for an install with no internet via INSTALL_RACORA_ARTIFACT_PATH (its contents). A release whose page lists no image archive installs online only. See Use Your Own Registry or Install Offline.

Overlay. Two things share the word. The CU-CP boot overlay is the ConfigMap nrcell-cu-cp-config the controller generates from every NRCell, the configuration the CU-CP starts with. A values overlay is a platform's or a core provider's values.yaml layered onto the chart at install time.

PCI, temporary PCI, pciSource. The physical cell identity (0 to 1007). A cell declared without spec.pci receives a temporary one from the pool 1002 to 1007 (pciSource: controller-temp) until the Intelligence Plane assigns a real one; a PCI you set is pciSource: spec. See Cell Identity.

Platform module. The Kubernetes underneath as a pluggable module: one directory per platform (platforms/<name>/) selected with INSTALL_RACORA_PLATFORM. Racora ships k3s (installs the cluster) and kubernetes (a cluster you run). See Platforms.

Provider declaration. The ConfigMap racora-core-provider a core provider renders in 5g-core: its name, and how subscribers reach it (subscribers.mode exec or none, the pod selector, the container, the apply and remove scripts). The core controller reads it and never branches on the provider. See How Core Providers Work.

Radio node. A host that drives one or more radios and runs their DUs; provisioned by Racora (real-time kernel, isolated cores, UHD) and labelled rf-ready. See Add a Radio Node.

RANN-D. Radio Access Neural Network, Decisions: the outbound interface from CU-IP, over which decisions leave the substrate toward the controller.

RANN-P. Radio Access Neural Network, Primitives: the inbound interface into CU-IP, carrying the protocol primitives (measurements) the CU-CP exports, batched by the RANN-P forwarder sidecar next to the CU-CP.

Release. A Racora version tag (vX.Y.Z) and everything it publishes: the chart with the component images pinned, the CRDs, the installer package, the mirrored k3s binary and, when it was built for that release, the image archive. See Versions and Compatibility and Release History.

Runtime command. A JSON command over the CU-CP's WebSocket (port 8001) that changes or reads a live cell: lock, bar, mobility configuration, handover triggers. The controller drives them from the NRCell; the Runtime Commands page lists every one.

sectorId. The cell's index under its gNB, assigned by the controller from the lowest free value, stable for the life of the cell, and recorded read-only in status. It is the cell-specific part of the NCI.

Span. One timed operation in a trace, emitted by a producer with its attributes and an outcome, collected into Tempo. Every span carries rann.layer; the names and attributes are the Span Schema.

Subscriber. The custom resource (subscribers.racora.io/v1alpha1, short name sim) that declares one SIM to the network: the IMSI, a Secret with its keys, and optionally the QoS class, the DNN and a static address. The core controller provisions it into the selected core. See the Subscriber API.

Substrate. The streaming graph CU-IP holds: the cells and the relations between them, updated from RANN-P primitives, read by the Intelligence Functions.

Uninstall scopes. What an uninstall may remove, following ownership: ran (the cells and subscribers, the release, the CRDs, the namespaces), host (ran plus Racora's own host artifacts on the node), cluster (host plus the cluster Racora installed). Node provisioning is never reversed. See Uninstall Racora.