Implementation of SDR-based 5G NR Cell Search Equipment

This paper describes an initial implementation of software defined radio (SDR) based 5G new radio (NR) cell search equipment. The proposed equipment is capable of detecting NR cells by decoding synchronization signal block (SSB) transmitted by gNodeBs in the vicinity. A step-by-step implementation of the cell search is given. The measurement results are compared with the results obtained using commercial 5G measurement equipment. The performance results validate that the proposed SDR-based equipment can successfully decode SSB and detect the same cells as the commercial measurement devices.