[srslte-users] srsRAN 21.04 Release Announcement

[Andre Puschmann]

Dear SDR hackers,

In case you missed it: srsLTE is now srsRAN!
Since early 2020, we have been developing support for 5G NR and as we
expand beyond 4G LTE, our "srsLTE" naming no longer fits like it used
to. With srsRAN, we will add 5G UE and gNodeB support but we will of
course continue to develop and improve our existing 4G solutions.
Indeed, this year sees the first large-scale deployments of our LTE
solutions in production networks in partnership with our commercial
clients. From the very beginning, we have designed and developed our
software for real-world deployment and this represents a huge milestone
for our team and community.

As part of project name change, we’ve updated our repo [1], the project
website [2] and our documentation [3]. All of your old srsLTE links are
automatically redirected and will be maintained so no git remote changes
are required.

Today we are announcing the very first release: srsRAN 21.04.
First and foremost, this release includes a FOSS 5G NSA UE
implementation with an x86-optimized FEC and PHY layer. In other words,
one can run a 5G NSA UE on commodity compute hardware with _all_
protocol layers implemented entirely in software.

Along with the code release, we’ve provided a dedicated application note
[4] showing how to setup and test 5G NSA with srsUE.

Besides the exciting news around srsUE, this new release also brings a
number of new features for our 4G ENB, including a new scheduler, uplink
power control, tunnel forwarding over S1 during mobility and PDCP
discard support to name just a few.

As usual, many more changes have been made under the hood, including
optimizations of data structures and memory usage and various other
bug-fixes and performance improvements throughout the code base. Please
check the release changelog [5] and git history for more details.

We'd also like to thank various external contributors, including
Supreeth Herle, Frederick Pelchat, Nikita Pushchin, Jan Bruckner and
Matan Perelman.


Happy hacking and enjoy the release.

The srsRAN team

[1] https://github.com/srsran/srsRAN/
[2] https://www.srsran.com/
[3] https://docs.srsran.com/
[4]
https://docs.srsran.com/en/latest/app_notes/source/5g_nsa/source/index.html
[5] https://github.com/srsran/srsRAN/blob/master/CHANGELOG