This short course is designed to deliver and present brief and concise details on How to Practically Build and Deploy Private 5G Networks.
The course is inspired by our recently published article titled Comprehensive Tutorial on how to Practically Build and Deploy 4G and 5G Networks.
The outline of the course is as follows:
(1) Introduction, motivation, and driving factors.
(2) Previous radio access networks (RANS) and
5G Open RAN,
(3) Possible ways of building a 5G network,
(4) Approach to building a 5G network using
Open RAN hardware and open-source
software,
(5) What is srsRAN and its features? and
(6) Simulating and practically Building a 5G network.
The course is designed for beginners that are looking for state-of-the-art and crucial knowledge on what is 5G? and the companies working towards 5G. This course offers a deep dive into the possible ways a 5G network is being built and deployed. In this course, we also provide technical knowledge of the radio access networks (RAN) that are being used in cellular networks. This course also aims to provide details about RAN, EDGE, and CORE frameworks that are built and utilized in wireless communication systems. The students will also learn about the available open-source software that can be used to build a 5G network. Software suite such as the srsRAN is also discussed in brief and their features are used as a whole when building and deploying a 5G network. This course also offers a quick overview of the design steps that are needed to be taken to virtually and practically build a 5G base station with real-time monitoring and implementation parameters. For more details about the whole course please go here.
Course and Tutorial Motivational Summary:
5G technology is the cornerstone for new services like eMBB, uRLLC, and mMTC, thus it should be globally available and affordable to make these services a reality. Yet most vendors responsible for the manufacturing of 5G hardware equipment and software still utilize and adopt the classical closed radio access network (RAN) concept. Consequently, this forces mobile operators, who want to deploy such equipment to build 5G cellular networks, to pay a hefty, unreasonable amount of money and still end up in vendor lock-in, which limits them from making personal changes in the network architecture or using different equipment and software from other vendors. This generally means that operators do not have complete control over the network, which they have paid for. To tackle this challenge, a new concept called Open RAN has recently emerged, which has attracted significant attention from industry leaders due to its very exciting features like the ability to use open-source software, general-purpose hardware, and having the hardware separated from the software while maintaining full transparency, and interoperability. Motivated by the many features and benefits enabled by Open RAN, there is a huge need for an educational comprehensive step-by-step tutorial on how an individual or company can practically build and deploy a 5G network using open-source software and commercial off-the-shelf, general-purpose hardware. In this tutorial, we discuss almost everything related to the history and background of 5G companies and manufacturers, legacy RAN solutions and equipment, and different ways and approaches to building a 5G network including RAN, CORE, and EDGE frameworks, open-source software, and generic hardware. After this, we illustrate in detail the steps of how to build and set up a 5G network using srsRAN with LimeSDR, and Raspberry Pi 4. In the end, we list the best possible PCs and software-defined radio (SDR) combinations that can be extremely helpful in building 5G networks.
