IISc, IIT Delhi, and C-DAC Collaborate to Pioneer Open-Source 5G Innovation | India News

BENGALURU: A collaboration agreement was signed between the Foundation for Science Innovation and Development (FSID) at IISc, the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) at IIT Delhi, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to create a production-quality open-source codebase for 5G, 5G Advanced, and 6G communication networks.
In a statement on Thursday, FSID said the initiative, backed by seed funding from the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), builds upon the Indian Open-Source Platform for End-to-End 5G Network (IOS-5GN) and establishes the Indian Open-Source Platform for Mobile Communication Networks (IOS-MCN), an academia-industry consortium aimed at accelerating indigenous technology development.
“Under the agreement, FSID, FITT, and C-DAC will serve as strategic partners alongside 16 organisations from R&D, telecom, startup, and academic sectors as industry partners. The three core partners will pool their strengths to jointly lead the IOS-MCN Operating Committee, overseeing project execution, technical direction, partner engagement, and administrative operations,” FSID said.
Prof Balan Gurumoorthy, Director, FSID, said the partnership will drive impactful innovation, bridging academia and industry to accelerate next-generation telecom solutions.
“The central goal of the IOS-MCN initiative is developing a fully open-source, production-grade mobile network stack aligned with global 3GPP and O-RAN standards. The consortium’s Governing Board, which includes strategic industry partners such as CDOT, Tejas Networks, and Simnovus, officially convened on February 24, 2025. A distributed team of over 70 technical experts is currently working on the codebase,” FSID said.
Nikhil Agarwal, MD, FITT, said the collaboration marks a significant step towards self-reliance in telecom infrastructure. By leveraging open-source technologies, he said, the consortium aims to create cost-effective and globally competitive 5G and 6G solutions.
“The consortium achieved a milestone on January 31, 2025, with the release of IOS-MCN Agartala v0.1.0, which includes Open RAN-compliant radio access network software, a service orchestration framework, and a 5G CORE. The system was successfully tested with two Made-in-India ORAN-compliant radio units developed by VVDN and Lekha Wireless, demonstrating downlink data rates of 600–700 Mbps and latency under 10 milliseconds using commercial mobile devices,” FSID said.
Kalai Selvan A, Director and Centre Head of C-DAC (T), said that this initiative was laying the foundation for an open, scalable, and resilient mobile communication network, fostering indigenous R&D and reducing reliance on proprietary technologies.