Portable Embedded Deployment of 5G Standalone (SA) System with Software-Defined Radio

Abstract:
We present a low-cost 5G-SA system based on edgecomputing hardware with open-source components and off-theshelf hardware in this paper. Our system is suitable for nomadic and ad-hoc 5G-SA use cases that require low-power consumption and small space. We show a complete development covering how to prepare the operating system for the installation of the 5G next-generation node B (gNB) and how to install and deploy the 5G-SA software components. We evaluate the performance, indoor coverage range, and power consumption of our system with measurements. We show that our system achieves acceptable data rates, and is very space and energy-efficient with an average power consumption of ≈ 24.81 W. We provide detailed and maintained documentation on the deployment of our system and discuss possible extensions for future work.