5G Campus Networks: A First Measurement Study

Justus Rischke,Sebastian Itting,Frank H P Fitzek,Peter Sossalla,Martin Reisslein

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3108423

Justus Rischke, Sebastian Itting + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3108423

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Abstract

A 5G campus network is a 5G network for the users affiliated with the campus organization, e.g., an industrial campus, covering a prescribed geographical area. A 5G campus network can operate as a so-called 5G non-standalone (NSA) network (which requires 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) spectrum access) or as a 5G standalone (SA) network (without 4G LTE spectrum access). 5G campus networks are envisioned to enable new use cases, which require cyclic delay-sensitive industrial communication, such as robot control. We design a rigorous testbed for measuring the one-way packet delays between a 5G end device via a radio access network (RAN) to a packet core with sub-microsecond precision as well as for measuring the packet core delay with nanosecond precision. With our testbed design, we conduct detailed measurements of the one-way download (downstream, i.e., core to end device) as well as one-way upload (upstream, i.e., end device to core) packet delays and losses for both 5G SA and 5G NSA hardware and network operation. We also measure the corresponding 5G SA and 5G NSA packet core processing delays for download and upload. We find that typically 95% of the SA download packet delays are in the range from 4–10 ms, indicating a fairly wide spread of the packet delays. Also, existing packet core implementations regularly incur packet processing latencies up to 0.4 ms, with outliers above one millisecond. Our measurement results inform the further development and refinement of 5G SA and 5G NSA campus networks for industrial use cases. We make the measurement data traces publicly available as the IEEE DataPort 5G Campus Networks: Measurement Traces dataset (DOI 10.21227/xe3c-e968).

Highlights

IntroductionNumerous emerging technological paradigms, such as Industry 4.0 [1]–[3], Internet of Things (IoT) [4]–[6], and self-driving vehicles [7]–[10], require reliable low-latency communication that is untethered from cables [11], [12]
LOSSES As first evaluation we examine the total one-way delay One-Way Delay (OWD) and packet losses for the entire download communication path from the traffic generator to the end devices as well as the upload communication path from the end devices to the traffic capture
Starting from the 10 packet/s rate, the OWD tends to very slightly increase as the packet rate increases to 100 packet/s rate and the OWD makes a substantial jump as the packet rate is increased to 1000 and 10000 packet/s, while increasing the packet rate to 100000 packets/s substantially reduces the OWD, even slightly below the OWD level for 10 packet/s for SA

Summary

Introduction

Numerous emerging technological paradigms, such as Industry 4.0 [1]–[3], Internet of Things (IoT) [4]–[6], and self-driving vehicles [7]–[10], require reliable low-latency communication that is untethered from cables [11], [12]. Proponents of these new technological paradigms have often deferred the provisioning of these required reliable lowlatency wireless communication services to the 5th Gener-.

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