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:

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).
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)
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.

Current Features

Please see:

https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g/-/blob/develop/doc/FEATURE_SET.md

Building and usage