The team at Software Radio Systems in Ireland have been working on an open source LTE stack for some time, to be used with software defined radio (SDR) hardware like the USRP, BladeRF and LimeSDR.

They’ve released SRSUE and SRSENB their open source EUTRAN UE and eNodeB, which allow your SDR hardware to function as a LTE UE and connect to a commercial eNB like a standard UE while getting all the juicy logs and debug info, or as a LTE eNB and have commercial UEs connect to a network you’re running, all on COTS hardware.

The eNB supports S1AP to connect to a 3GPP compliant EPC, like Open5Gs, but also comes bundled with a barebones EPC for testing.

The UE allows you to do performance testing and gather packet captures on the MAC & PHY layers, something you can’t do on a commericial UE. It also supports software-USIMs (IMSI / K / OP variables stored in a text file) or physical USIMs using a card reader.

I’ve got a draw full of SDR hardware, from the first RTL-SDR dongle I got years ago, to a few HackRFs, a LimeSDR up to the BladeRF x40.

Really cool software to have a play with, I’ve been using SRSUE to get a better understanding of the lower layers of the Uu interface.

Installation

After mucking around trying to satisfy all the dependencies from source I found everything I needed could be found in Debian packages from the repos of the maintainers.

To begin with we need to install the BladeRF drivers and SopySDR modules to abstract it to UHD:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:myriadrf/drivers
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:bladerf/bladerf
apt-get install *bladerf*
apt-get install libgnuradio-uhd3.7.11 libuhd-dev soapysdr-module-uhd uhd-soapysdr

Next up installing Software Radio System’s repo:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:srslte/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install srslte -y 

And that’s it!