This page is dedicated to the 5G-NR development in OpenAirInterface

Development process

The main branch for development is oai/develop.
When a new feature for 5G-NR is developed, a feature branch is created starting from the latest oai/develop.
When finished, the feature branch is merged back to oai/develop.

There is a dedicated mailing list for the project: openair5g-nr@lists.eurecom.fr.
You may subscribe here: https://lists.eurecom.fr/sympa/subscribe/openair5g-nr.

We use trello to track the development process: https://trello.com/b/7kFj0kFp/oai-weekly-meetings.
To get access to it, write an email to the mailing list (see above).

Progress is also discussed in our developer meetings: See OpenAirDevMeetings for more details.

Operating system

• Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 LTS with the low latency kernel option
• CentOS Linux release 7.4 or higher
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 or higher

Hardware requirements

PC

The processing requirements for 5G-NR are much higher than for 4G, so a high end PC or server is needed.
So far, we have been using:

1. Intel Core i7 6900K (8 cores), 16GB DDR, 480GB SSD
   Allows SW LDPC on 3 cores (1 segment per slot, 3 slots decoded in parallel, up to 30Mb/s)
   or
   LDPC on FPGA (up to 300Mb/s on 80MHz SISO).

2. Intel Core i9 7980EX (18 cores) shall support future configurations incl. MIMO
   Allows parallel LDPC SW decoder on 9 or 12 cores, up to 3 (tested) or 5 (ongoing) segments per slot or 140Mb/s
   or
   LDPC on FPGA (same as above)

3. Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6154 CPU @ 3.00GHz with 18 cores and 2x10Gbit Ethernet

SDR (Software Defined Radio) / USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral)

Please also see the following presentation for more details on hardware:
https://www.openairinterface.org/docs/workshop/5_OAI_Workshop_20180620/KALTENBERGER_5G%20New%20Radio%20in%20OpenAirInterface.pdf

USRP N310

This is the latest version of the USRP designed specifically for 5G-NR. It will support up to 100MHz bandwidth.
See https://www.ettus.com/product/details/USRP-N310 for details.

USRP X310

This older platform will also work with 5G-NR, but only supports bandwidths up to 80MHz with 3/4 sampling.

USRP B210

This platform can be used for bandwidths up to 40MHz using 3/4 sampling.

SYRTEM platform

The SYRTEM platform is based on:

• the Xilinx EVALUATION KIT ZYNQ-7000 ZC706 (ex. supplier Digikey ref: 122-1904-ND, 2427€), and
• the Analog Device Transceiver type ADRV9371 (ex. supplier : Digikey ADRV9371-W/PCBZ-ND ('WIDE TUNING RANGE 300MHZ-6HGZ' version) 1169€).

Please see http://www.syrtem.com for more information.

LDPC offload

As a high performance alternative to the software LDPC decoder included in this release, the decoder can also be offloaded to another FPGA board (EVALUATION KIT ZYNQ-7000 ZC706).
The FPGA binary image is provided by Creonic (https://www.creonic.com), while the drivers are provided by Syrtem (http://www.syrtem.com/).
Please get in touch with us if you want to use them.

Building and usage

Please see:

• https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g/blob/develop/doc/BUILD.md
• https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g/blob/develop/doc/RUNMODEM.md

NSA setup with COTS UE

please see gNB vs COTS UE Testing

Further documents

• OAI_Software_Architecture_for_Dual_Connectivity_in_E-UTRA_and_5G-NR_and_nFAPI_for_MAC-PHY_Interface.docx
• UE_FAPI-like_interface.docx

-- Florian Kaltenberger 24.7.2018