A Comparative Analysis of Open-source Software in an E2E 5G Standalone Platform

Open-source 5G cellular networks are becoming important to reduce cost and enable more vendors to enter the booming 5G market. Many open-source software are available for both the Radio Access Network (RAN) and the core network and verifying their interoperability and their performance when combined is critical. This has not been studied as yet and it is the topic of this paper. We have deployed a 5G-standalone platform to assess the interoperability of various core and RAN open-source software developed by different developers and to study how different testbeds comprising different core and RAN open-source software perform. For our experiments, we have selected srsRAN_Project, and OpenAirInterface 5G RAN, as the leading open-source RAN software. Similarly, we have selected Open5GS, and OpenAirInterface 5G Core to be the open-source 5G core software. Our performance results show that in the RAN domain OpenAirInterface 5G RAN wins on downlink rate, and latency while srsRAN_Project wins on uplink rate. Moreover, we did not see a significant difference in the performance of the two 5G core software.