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1. Comparative Performance Evaluation of mmWave 5G NR and LTE in a Campus Scenario

   Tehrani-Moayyed, M.; Restuccia, F.; Basagni, S. (October 2020, Proceedings of IEEE VTC 2020 Fall)

   The extremely high data rates provided by communications in the millimeter-length (mmWave) frequency bands can help address the unprecedented demands of next-generation wireless communications. However, atmospheric attenuation and high propagation loss severely limit the coverage of mmWave networks. To overcome these challenges, multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) provides beamforming capabilities and high-gain steer- able antennas to expand communication coverage at mmWave frequencies. The main contribution of this paper is the per- formance evaluation of mmWave communications on top of the recently released NR standard for 5G cellular networks. Furthermore, we compare the performance of NR with the 4G long-term evolution (LTE) standard on a highly realistic campus environment. We consider physical layer constraints such as transmit power, ambient noise, receiver noise figure, and practical antenna gain in both cases, and examine bitrate and area coverage as the criteria to benchmark the performance. We also show the impact of MIMO technology to improve the performance of the 5G NR cellular network. Our evaluation demonstrates that 5G NR provides on average 6.7 times bitrate improvement without remarkable coverage degradation. 

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2. Mixed-Carrier Communication for Technology Division Multiplexing

   https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10182248  

   Hussein, Ahmed F.; Saha, Dola; Elgala, Hany (September 2021, Electronics)

   null (Ed.)

   Recently, research on sixth-generation (6G) networks has gained significant interest. 6G is expected to enable a wide-range of applications that fifth-generation (5G) networks will not be able to serve reliably, such as tactile Internet. Additionally, 6G is expected to offer Terabits per second (Tbps) data rates, 10 times lower latency, and near 100% coverage, compared to 5G. Thus, 6G is expected to expand across all available spectrums including terahertz (THz) and optical frequency bands. In this manuscript, mixed-carrier communication (MCC) is investigated as a novel physical layer (PHY) design for 6G networks. The proposed MCC version in this study is based on visible light communication (VLC). MCC enables a unified transmission PHY design to connect devices with different complexities, simultaneously. The design trade-offs and the required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per individual modulation schemes embedded within MCC are investigated. The complexity analysis shows that a conventional optical OFDM receiver can capture the high-speed bit-stream embedded within MCC. For a forward error correction (FEC) bit-error-rate (BER) threshold of 3.8×10−3, MCC is optimized to maximize the spectral efficiency by embedding 2-beacon phase-shift keying (2-BnPSK) within an MCC envelope on top of 12 bits per beacon position modulation (BPM) symbol. 

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3. Demo: Decoding Control Information Passively from Standalone 5G Network

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3636534.3698840  

   Wan, Haoran; Cao, Xuyang; Marder, Alexander; Jamieson, Kyle (December 2024, ACM)

   5G New Radio cellular networks are designed to provide high Quality of Service for application on wirelessly connected devices. However, changing conditions of the wireless last hop can degrade application performance, and the applications have no visibility into the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). Most 5G network operators run closed networks, limiting the potential for co-design with the wider-area internet and user applications. This paper demonstrates NR-Scope, a passive, incrementally-deployable, and independently-deployable Standalone 5G network telemetry system that can passively measure fine-grained RAN capacity, latency, and retransmission information. Application servers can take advantage of the measurements to achieve better millisecond scale, application-level decisions on offered load and bit rate adaptation than end-to-end latency measurements or end-to-end packet losses currently permit. We demonstrate the performance of NR-Scope by decoding the downlink control information (DCI) for downlink and uplink traffic of a 5G Standalone base station in real-time. 

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4. Deep Q-Network for 5G NR Downlink Scheduling

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCWorkshops53468.2022.9814547  

   AlQwider, Walaa; Rahman, Talha Faizur; Marojevic, Vuk (July 2022, Deep Q-Network for 5G NR Downlink Scheduling)

   The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduced the fifth generation new radio (5G NR) specifications which offer much higher flexibility than legacy cellular communications standards to better handle the heterogeneous service and performance requirements of the emerging use cases. This flexibility, however, makes the resources management more complex. This paper therefore designs a data driven resource allocation method based on the deep Q-network (DQN). The objective of the proposed model is to maximize the 5G NR cell throughput while providing a fair resource allocation across all users. Numerical results using a 3GPP compliant 5G NR simulator demonstrate that the DQN scheduler better balances the cell throughput and user fairness than existing schedulers. 

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5. NR-Scope: A Practical 5G Standalone Telemetry Tool

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3680121.3697808  

   Wan, Haoran; Cao, Xuyang; Marder, Alexander; Jamieson, Kyle (December 2024, ACM)

   NextG cellular networks are designed to meet Quality of Service requirements for various applications in and beyond smartphones and mobile devices. However, lacking introspection into the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) application and transport layer designers are ill-poised to cope with the vagaries of the wireless last hop to a mobile client, while 5G network operators run mostly closed networks, limiting their potential for co-design with the wider internet and user applications. This paper presents NR-Scope, a passive, incrementally-deployable, and independently-deployable Standalone 5G network telemetry system that can stream fine-grained RAN capacity, latency, and retransmission information to application servers to enable better millisecond scale, application-level decisions on offered load and bit rate adaptation than end-to-end latency measurements or end-to-end packet losses currently permit. Our experimental evaluation on various 5G Standalone base stations demonstrates NR-Scope can achieve less than 0.1% throughput error estimation for every UE in a RAN. The code is available at https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/NR-Scope. 

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