A First Look at Commercial 5G Performance on Smartphones
Arvind Narayanan, Eman Ramadan, Jason Carpenter, Qingxu Li, Yu Liu, Feng Qian, Zhi-Li Zhang
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Minnesota
Abstract
We conduct to our knowledge a first measurement study of commercial 5G performance on smartphones by closely examining 5G networks of three carriers (two mmWave carriers, one mid-band 5G carrier) in three U.S. cities. We conduct extensive field tests on 5G performance in diverse urban environments. We systematically analyze the handoff mechanisms in 5G and their impact on network performance, and explore the feasibility of using location and possibly other environmental information to predict the network performance. We also study the app performance (web browsing, HTTP download, and volumetric video streaming) over 5G. Our study consumes more than 15 TB of data. Conducted when 5G just made its debut, it provides a “baseline” for studying how 5G performance evolves, and identifies key research directions on improving 5G users’ experience in a cross-layer manner.
Experiments
We conduct on-field experiments to evaluate 5G performance in 3 cities in the United States: Minneapolis, MN; Chicago, IL; Atlanta, GA.
TCP Throughput Test
Minneapolis, MN
Walking Loop
Minneapolis, MN
Testing Three 5G Carriers
Atlanta, GA
Obstruction Test
Chicago, IL
Paper | Talk | Slides
Dataset (5Gophers-v1.0)
We release the data collected by us in this paper. This data is important in providing a first impression of the world's very first commercial 5G rollouts, and serves as an important baseline of 5G performance. We conduct several experiments to evaluate 5G performance, including but not limited to throughput performance, latency measurements, impact of mobility and obstructions, handoff analysis among many others. Our experiments also illustrate the pros and cons of the different 5G technologies.
