Software packages and user documentation published to support basic LTE service.

We are pleased to report that the next milestone has been achieved and it is now possible to set up a network to provide basic service, supported by:

• A reference hardware platform
• Packaged fork of srsRAN
• Documentation covering spectrum licensing, software installation, network configuration and subscriber provisioning.

For further details, see the User Guide.

Why a fork?

The reason for maintaining a fork of srsRAN is so that we can have direct LMS API integration, as we have found that this gives us far better performance and in addition to which we have more control over SDR configuration. For example, we can configure an external frequency reference, which is important for cellular networks, but at present not possible via the SoapySDR API.

We will re-evaluate this position moving forwards. It shouldn’t be the case that there is such a performance overhead to using SoapySDR and this likely points to an issue in the interfacing between the library and Lime Suite.

Next steps

The next steps include further work on the CI platform, such to extend test coverage, e.g. benchmarking throughput and measuring stability. Also assembling additional CI hardware in order to provide support for testing VoLTE call setup.