A Low-Cost Experimental 5G System to Foster Digital Transformation in 4G Uncovered Areas

The digital divide resulting from low network coverage, with disparities between urban and rural areas, is an obstacle to economic, healthcare, and education activities in sub-Saharan countries. Addressing the growing demand for connectivity with reliable, low-latency, and high-bandwidth network access is an urgent need to promote economic growth in these regions. However, broadening network coverage with reliable and sufficient network resources to satisfy the demand is not always economically viable for mobile network operators. As such, making the leap from 3G to standalone 5G through private initiatives could be the right approach to enable rural communities to access connectivity-based services such as distance education and remote medical care, despite the cost of 5G deployment. Thus, low-cost private networks capable of delivering customized solutions can help bridge the digital divide, and 5G SA presents a great opportunity to exploit. It is therefore important to set up testbeds to deploy 5G SA networks to study and test use cases, particularly in the absence of a 4G LTE network. Network slicing has emerged as a solution to fully exploit the potential of 5G networks, especially with regard to flexibility and programmability, as well as resource and infrastructure sharing. The network slicing approach enables the creation of multiple logical networks, each dedicated to a particular service or specific application within a single physical infrastructure. We present a low-cost end-to-end 5G network slicing testbed for private networks and performance tests with respect to energy consumption, the ability to cover the main development axes of 5G, and common user needs such as VoNR, video streaming, and drone-based network use cases for IoT applications in areas lacking network coverage.