Commodity ARM boards can run lightweight 5G base stations for drones
Toward Lightweight Aerial 5G gNBs: Reproducible OAI Testbed on Commodity ARM Platforms
Cryptography and Security
Summary
Flying 5G base stations on drones need to be very light and low power to keep flying longer. The authors show that common ARM computers like Raspberry Pi 5 and Jetson Orin Nano can handle important parts of 5G communication with good speed and efficiency. They tested this setup with real radios and phones, achieving a large fraction of traditional computer performance with less weight and power use. They also added a feature to send emergency alerts from the airborne base station, making it useful in disaster areas. The authors share their software so others can reproduce and build on their drone-based 5G system.
What this means in practice
- •For emergency communications teams: Deploy aerial 5G base stations on drones to broadcast emergency warnings rapidly over affected areas using commodity ARM hardware.
- •For network infrastructure engineers: Implement low-power 5G distributed units on affordable ARM platforms to extend cellular coverage with reduced weight and power consumption.
Authors
Marc Duboc, Ammar El Falou
Abstract
For a battery-powered UAV base station, every gram and watt devoted to RAN-compute competes with flight-duration margin. We therefore keep the 5G Core (5GC) and central unit (CU) on the ground and design the airborne unit around only the backhaul endpoint, distributed unit (DU), and radio. The key question is then a practical one: can widely available commodity ARM computers sustain a real radio OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5G DU with useful performance over heterogeneous F1? We answer it with Raspberry Pi~5 and Jetson Orin Nano as DUs, a USRP B210, a commercial handset, and Ethernet, Wi-Fi/GRE, and 5G/WireGuard backhaul. Jetson preserves 88.4% of x86 split-DU Ethernet DL throughput and 87.5-89.0% across all three bearers; 5G/WireGuard preserves 76.4-77.1% of each host's wired DL rate. The validated Jetson/B210/RM500Q-GL electronics weigh 657.4 g and draw about 28 W under sustained traffic (757.4 g with integration allowance). A controlled link adaptation intervention raises split DL from 23.4 to 99.4 Mb/s as the dominant Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) moves from 3 to 26. Finally, synchronized radio, F1-U, CPU, and UHD evidence narrows the remaining monolithic-split gap to split-path scheduling/timing behavior. Beyond performance, this capability serves the emergency-response use case that motivates the aerial cell: once deployed above an affected area, it can broadcast a PWS warning message. We release the OAI patch that carries the single-segment Write-Replace Warning over F1 from CU to DU, where SIB8 is scheduled to the handset. The public artifact makes the payload, performance, and emergency-broadcast baseline reproducible with laboratory-accessible hardware.