Spotlight on 5G: Performance, Device Evolution and Challenges from a Mobile Operator Perspective

Fifth Generation (5G) has been acknowledged as a significant shift in cellular networks, expected to run significantly different classes of services and do so with outstanding performance in terms of low latency, high capacity, and extreme reliability. Managing the resulting complexity of mobile network architectures will depend on making efficient decisions at all network levels based on end-user requirements. However, to achieve this, it is critical to first understand the current mobile ecosystem and capture the device heterogeneity, which is one of the major challenges for ensuring the successful exploitation of 5G technologies.

In this paper, we conduct a large-scale measurement study of a commercial mobile operator in the UK, focusing on bringing forward a real-world view on the available network resources, as well as how more than 30M end-user devices utilize the mobile network. We focus on the current status of the 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) deployment and the network-level performance and show how it caters to the prominent use cases that 5G promises to support. Finally, we demonstrate that a finegranular set of requirements is, in fact, necessary to orchestrate the service to the diverse groups of 5G devices, some of which operate in permanent roaming.