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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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This content will become publicly available on December 9, 2025
NR-Scope: A Practical 5G Standalone Telemetry Tool
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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- PAR ID:
- 10567687
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400711084
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 73 to 80
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- 5G network Telemetry Wireless network Network measurement
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Los Angeles, CA, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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