Minimum Hardware requirement for private 5G project using srsRAN

[Udanthakck]

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to set up a small private 5G network using srsRAN and would like to know the minimum hardware requirements needed for a functional deployment. My use case involves a small-scale network with a few user devices (UEs) and a basic gNB setup.

Could you please provide recommendations for:

CPU & RAM requirements for a stable deployment
Compatible RF frontends (e.g., USRP models or other alternatives)
Storage & other system requirements
Any additional hardware considerations for optimal performance
I appreciate any insights from those who have experience with similar setups. Thanks in advance!

Would you like me to adjust anything based on your specific use case?

[pgawlowicz]

We provide an example PC setup description here:
https://docs.srsran.com/projects/project/en/latest/tutorials/source/hw_kit/source/index.html

[Udanthakck]

CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 7900 | 12 cores, 3.7GHz, includes AMD Wraith Prism cooler

RAM | Kingston Fury Beast 32GB | 2x 16GB, DDR5 6GHz, CL36

These are some requirements in the given example. My question is whether we need this much RAM or CPU cores for a small deployment using srsRAN or is this just for the example.

[pgawlowicz]

Indeed, this setup is recommended for 100MHz cell and MIMO.

The project is very scalable and some people (also in this forum) managed to run it using Raspberry Pi 5.

@ninjab3s could you comment here?

[ninjab3s]

Hi @Udanthakck!

Its very tricky to provide a list of needed hardware parts for a specific deployment. But what we can say is that we have successfully tested a 100MHz deployment on that CPU. For smaller deployments you can for sure use smaller CPUs/less RAM. But how much is hard to say. We have a tutorial here: https://docs.srsran.com/projects/project/en/latest/tutorials/source/testmode/source/index.html that describes how to test your hardware. We usually propose to over provision the hardware for deployments about 1.5x in order to have some headroom for load spikes. Something that I recommend is having AVX512 supported by the CPU, this brings a big boost compared to AVX2 only.

[Udanthakck]

Thank you @ninjab3s and @pgawlowicz

[Zplusless]

Hi @pgawlowicz, The tutorial you provided is for split-7.2. If I use an advanced USRP (x310 or x410), is it possible to achieve equivalent performance?

[pgawlowicz]

In general, it is possible to achieve a full performance for a 100MHz cell with MIMO with a USRP.
For example, here is a report from a user using N310: #275

Probably, it should be possible with the PC described in the split 7-2 tutorial.