Enhancing 5G performance: A standalone system platform with customizable features

The fifth generation (5G) mobile networks have introduced new features compared to the previous generation that resulted in increased overall throughput and decreased latency. At the same time, the complexity of 5G-based standards and deployment scenarios is increasing. This further drives the development of software for testing new ideas and different 5G and Beyond-5G use cases in academia and industry. In this paper we propose a flexible end-to-end (E2E) standalone 5G system platform based on the Open Air Interface software, which is fully reprogrammable and customizable. We created a set of Linux shell scripts, which improves the ease of use of the software, speeding up the process of implementing different connectivity scenarios. We present the main capabilities of the platform and the achievable throughput and latency for different bandwidth parts. Setting the DL/UL Transmission periodicity to 2 ms, we measured a latency of 6.78 ms for the mean RTT value, which is acceptable for many applications requiring low latency.