Development of an open-source GSM femtocell and integrated core infrastructure

Open source development applied to cellular GSM technology is a fairly recent, but growing, concept. Another trend is the continually growing capability of low-power embedded processors, which makes them increasingly suitable for open source GSM applications. This paper applies two open source software packages, OpenBTS and OpenBSC, to an readily available embedded hardware platform, the Universal Hardware Radio Peripheral (USRP) E100. The USRP E100 device is a heterogeneous processor platform designed for software-defined radio use. The result is an embedded base station that can be deployed in standalone configuration or as part of a larger GSM network. A software radio transceiver implementation is presented that leverages optimized capabilities of all available processors: a general purpose ARM processor, DSP, and FPGA. Comparative performance measures are also provided.