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The highly anticipated 5G mmWave technology promises to enable many uplink-oriented, latency-critical applications (LCAs) such as Augmented Reality and Connected Autonomous Vehicles. Nonetheless, recent measurement studies have largely focused on its downlink performance. In thiswork,we perform a systematic study of the uplink performance of commercial 5G mmWave networks across 3 major US cities and 2 mobile operators. Our study makes three contributions. (1) It reveals that 5G mmWave uplink performance is geographically diverse, substantially higher over LTE in terms of bandwidth and latency, but often erratic and suboptimal, which can degrade LCA performance. (2) Our analysis of control messages and PHY-level KPIs shows that the root causes for the suboptimal performance are fundamental to 5G mmWave and cannot be easily fixed via simple tuning of network configurations. (3) We identify various design and deployment optimizations that 5G operators can explore to bring 5G mmWave performance to the level needed to ultimately support the LCAs.
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How Mature is 5G Deployment? A Cross-Sectional, Year-Long Study of 5G Uplink Performance
After a rapid deployment worldwide over the past few years, 5G is expected to have reached a mature deployment stage to provide measurable improvement of network performance and user experience over its predecessors. In this study, we aim to assess 5G deployment maturity via three conditions: (1) Does 5G performance remain stable over a long time span? (2) Does 5G provide better performance than its predecessor LTE? (3) Does the technology offer similar performance across diverse geographic areas and cellular operators? We answer this important question by conducting a cross-sectional, year-long measurement study of 5G uplink performance. Leveraging a custom Android App, we collected 5G uplink performance measurements (of critical importance to latency-critical apps) spanning 8 major cities in 7 countries and two different continents. Our measurements show that 5G deployment in major cities appears to have matured, with no major performance improvements observed over a one-year period, but 5G does not provide consistent, superior measurable performance over LTE, especially in terms of latency, and further there exists clear uneven 5G performance across the 8 cities. Our study suggests that, while 5G deployment appears to have stagnated, it is short of delivering its promised performance and user experience gain over its predecessor.
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- PAR ID:
- 10616440
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 978-3-903176-63-8
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 276 to 284
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- 5G, Uplink Performance, Cross-sectional Study
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Thessaloniki, Greece
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619877
