Enabling Real-Time AI in O-RAN: Deploying and Measuring AI Inside a Near-RT RIC xApp

Lawrence Obiuwevwi, Krzysztof J. Rechowicz, Sampath Jayarathna, Safdar Hussain Bouk, Fahmida Afrin, C. Nicolas Barati, Neda Moghim, Valentina Nanou, Muhammad Enayetur Rahman, Sachin Shetty

Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architectures introduce programmable Near-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controllers (Near-RT RICs) that support closed-loop control through xApps at timescales from 10 ms to 1 s. Although AI has been widely studied for RAN optimization, fewer works demonstrate measured AI inference embedded directly within the Near-RT RIC software loop on a live testbed. This paper presents an AI-enabled network-state classification xApp implemented on an OpenAirInterface (OAI) and FlexRIC testbed. The xApp is trained and evaluated on a structured synthetic dataset that emulates cross-layer RAN states using MAC, RLC, PDCP, GTP, and UE-count features. The results validate embedding and execution feasibility rather than production-level generalization. Logistic regression and a shallow multilayer perceptron (MLP) are exported as deterministic C inference modules and compiled into the xApp binary, eliminating external machine-learning runtime dependencies. Measured inference latency is 1 to 5 microseconds for logistic regression and 10 to 25 microseconds for the MLP, while end-to-end service latency remains below 4 ms. A six-model comparison shows that supervised models achieve similar accuracy, ranging from 0.88 to 0.90, indicating that LR and MLP similarity reflects the proxy problem structure rather than limited model exploration. Noise ablation, confusion-matrix analysis, and CDF-based latency characterization show that both embedded models satisfy the 10 ms Near-RT budget for more than 95% of projected loop executions. These results demonstrate that lightweight AI can operate within Near-RT RIC timing constraints while preserving deterministic execution. We also release RIC Workbench, a lightweight orchestration dashboard for reproducing the testbed on commodity hardware.