In the fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR), systems can be operated at the sub-6GHz or millimeter wave spectrums. Due to the serious fading characteristics of the millimeter waves, third generation partnership project (3GPP) doubles the number of the physical layer cell identifiers from 504 of the conventional fourth generation (4G) long term evolution (LTE) to 1008 for the 5G NR. Therefore, the required calculations at the user equipment (UE) to identify the serving base stations become more and more complicated since that UE must conduct the identification via synchronization signal block (SSB) periodically. Therefore, it is an important issue to reduce the identification calculations for the purposes of green communications or low latency applications. In the paper, a low complexity algorithm of cell identification using the secondary synchronization signal grouping and correlation shortening is proposed to reduce the required computations of the physical cell identification. Both simulations and experiments were conducted via the software defined radio (SDR) to evaluate the performances. According to the results, it can be shown that the proposed low complexity algorithm can complete the cell identification correctly with the computational reduction advantage up to 90% than the compared literary cell identification methods.