Understanding Operational 5G: A First Measurement Study on Its Coverage, Performance and Energy Consumption
By Dongzhu Xu, Anfu Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Guixian Wang, Xi Liu, Congkai An, Yiming Shi, Liang Liu, Huadong Ma. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2020
317 citations recorded by the source corpus.
5G, as a monumental shift in cellular communication technology, holds tremendous potential for spurring innovations across many vertical industries, with its promised multi-Gbps speed, sub-10 ms low latency, and massive connectivity. On the other hand, as 5G has been deployed for only a few months, it is unclear how well and whether 5G can eventually meet its prospects. In this paper, we demystify operational 5G networks through a first-of-its-kind cross-layer measurement study. Our measurement focuses on four major perspectives: (i) Physical layer signal quality, coverage and hand-off performance; (ii) End-to-end throughput and latency; (iii) Quality of experience of 5G's niche applications (e.g., 4K/5.7K panoramic video telephony); (iv) Energy consumption on smartphones. The results reveal that the 5G link itself can approach Gbps throughput, but legacy TCP leads to surprisingly low capacity utilization (< 32%), latency remains too high to support tactile applications and power consumption escalates to 2 - 3x over 4G. Our analysis suggests that the wireline paths, upper-layer protocols, computing and radio hardware architecture need to co-evolve with 5G to form an ecosystem, in order to fully unleash its potential.
Subfields: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac91a3df43413be2c59fb48a67c12e6183a33aa2
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In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
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Citations in the corpus
- All One Needs to Know about Metaverse: A Complete Survey on Technological Singularity, Virtual Ecosystem, and Research Agenda (2021, background): “from the ISP [507].”
- A variegated look at 5G in the wild: performance, power, and QoE implications (2021, methodology): “[59] conducted a preliminary measurement study to understand mid-band 5G’s power consumption and energy efficiency by saturating the link capacity and compare it with that of 4G/LTE.”