A Reference Deployment of a Minimal Open-Source Private Industry and Campus 5G Standalone (SA) System

With the fifth-generation new radio (5G NR) being ready for deployment and with the possibility of acquiring private licenses, 5G is ready for campus deployment in industry and academia. As industry and academia do not have their own LTE networks, especially 5G standalone (SA) implementations gain importance. However, SA deployments include all components from the user equipment to radio units and core functionality in a large distributed system to work properly. Since commercial systems are costly, it is worth considering open-source implementations. We face the following challenges: many open-source projects are yet in the development phase, it is challenging to deploy 5G systems because hardware and software continuously evolve, documentation is incomplete, and 5G SA is a new technology. A small community runs a continuously changing deployment in a development branch. From the lessons learned, our contribution to the community is to provide a well-documented deployment based on existing tutorials and sometimes in code research and configuration file tests like try and error. For evaluation and proof of concept, we built a 5G system at the Technische Hochschule Lübeck - University of Applied Sciences with the provision of all information to deploy the system step by step and perform integration tests. We provide a complete solution for low costs of 10k EUR with off-the-shelf components and provide basic connectivity and iperf measurement results for latency and throughput as a reference for own deployments.

I. Introduction

Telecommunication or cellular systems have evolved in the last twenty years from dedicated real-time systems with specialized hardware, software, and protocols to loosely-coupled large flexible distributed systems. The distributed 5G system consists mainly of two segments (1) radio access network and (2) core network. The new generation radio access network (NG-RAN) consists of several new generation Node Bs (gNBs), which are radio base stations connected to the 5G core network (5GC) and each other. The gNB has three main parts: the Centralized Unit (CU), the Distributed Unit (DU), and the Radio Unit (RU), which are deployed as a part of the distributed system. Radio Units are named remote radio heads (RRH) in some publications.