The Foundation for Science Innovation and Development (FSID) at IISc Bengaluru, the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) at IIT Delhi, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) have signed a collaboration agreement to create and support a production-grade open-source codebase for the development of 5G, 5G-Advanced, and 6G mobile networks.
The initiative is supported by seed funding from the Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY) and builds on the Indian Open-Source Platform for End-to-End 5G Network (IOS-5GN). It has also set the foundation for the Indian Open-Source Platform for Mobile Communication Networks (IOS-MCN), a consortium aimed at accelerating the development of indigenous 5G and future technologies.
FSID, FITT, and C-DAC are the strategic partners in the consortium, which also includes 16 other industry participants from the research and development, telecom, startup, and academic sectors.
The three core partners will combine their expertise in research, technology development, and commercialisation to jointly lead the IOS-MCN Operating Committee, which will manage project execution, technical direction, partner coordination, and administration.
The IOS-MCN Governing Board includes organisations such as the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT), Tejas Networks, and Simnovus. The IOS-MCN project aims to develop a fully open-source, production-grade mobile network stack that adheres to global Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and open radio access network (O-RAN) standards.
The system has demonstrated downlink data rates of 600–700 Mbps and latency under 10 milliseconds using commercial mobile devices.
