Experimental Study of USRP N210 as Simple GSM OpenBTS 5.0 for Remote Areas

Among the thousands of islands in Indonesia, there are few remote areas that have not installed telecommunication networks. This paper proposes a simple, inexpensive and portable GSM telecommunications infrastructure in the form of OpenBTS with USRP N210 that can be applied in remote areas. Difficulties and failures of implementing OpenBTS usually occurred when compiling OpenBTS software. So this paper describes an experimental application of the GSM OpenBTS software version 5.0 on USRP N210. The dev/ build.sh and deb / libcoredumper / build.sh files were revised to avoid failing. Then, the new script letc/asterisk/extensions-custom.conf makes asterisk executable. Version 5.0 is more practical and easier to install, and the Asterik softswitch installation has been integrated into the OpenBTS software. Output of the experiment is a cheap and portable OpenBTS infrastructure which is used as a GSM radio transceiver at 900MHz (900.401 Mhz uplink and 945.401 MHz downlink). The result is 4 cellphones connected to the GSM system. Performance test on the experimental device is a coverage area of 25 m for audio calls with a receiving power level of = -65 dB, and 75 m for text messages with a power level of -80 dB.