NomadicBTS-2: A Network-in-a-Box with Software-Defined Radio and Web-Based App for Multiband Cellular Communication

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile communications technologies has significantly contributed to the plausibility of emerging economies. However, there still exists a digital divide in several remote and hard-to-reach places, owing to the high CAPital EXpenditure (CAPEX) and OPerating EXpenditure (OPEX) of mobile network operators. In this study, a cost-effective softwaredefined base station named NomadicBTS-2 is developed and prototyped based on open-source technologies and the Software-Defined Radio (SDR) paradigm. NomadicBTS-2 comprises Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) B200 as the Radio Frequency (RF) hardware front-end. The software backend comprises of open-source software such as USRP Hardware Driver (UHD) and services (i.e., OpenBTS, Asterisk, SIPAuthserve and SMQueue). In addition, we developed a new software (named NomadicBTS WebApp) to configure and monitor the UHD and software services through a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI). NomadicBTS-2 was tested using two mobile stations (MSs) for simplex and duplex communication while the network link quality parameters were evaluated to determine users’ Quality of Experience (QoE). Experimentation results showed that within a pico-cell, the link quality is sufficient for call routing and Short Messaging Services (SMSs) between user-to-user and network-to-user. The prototype provides a basis for a Network-in-a-Box that can be deployed for short-range communication in rural areas, hard-to-reach places, emergency situations, IoT sensor networks and to augment existing base stations to mitigate network congestion. It can also be a viable testbed in teaching and research laboratories to explore new frontiers in SDR, cognitive radio, and other wireless communication domains.