Leveraging 5G SA for R&D: Capabilities and Beam-Based Empirical Analysis

The deployment of the Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks has been addressed by the operators during the last years. However, it has been focused on 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) because they have leveraged the current Long Term Evolution (LTE) deployments. NSA mode uses LTE as anchor technology, allowing the operators to keep providing coverage in all the areas they covered with LTE, and to gradually introduce 5G in high-traffic or crowded areas. But NSA operation do not enable all the novelties introduced by 5G in order to achieve better performance. Moreover, novel features (e.g., beamforming) also introduce a lot of parameters whose configuration will become a work item towards network management. At the University of Malaga (UMA) MobileNet research group, a complete 5G Standalone (SA) infrastructure has been deployed for Research & Development (R&D) purposes. It is a private network composed of commercial equipment that allows controlling all the components, modifying all the parameters, and getting metrics from each part of the network. The aim of this work is to describe the infrastructure and potential opportunities regarding the different 5G-enabled UC. To achieve this, an in-depth study has been accomplished in order to unveil the different options to configure the network, interact with it, and collect its metrics. First, the indoor and outdoor cells’ baseline performance has been measured. Then, research experiments have been performed on the infrastructure, and the results are presented in this paper. The infrastructure capabilities are mainly disclosed, and additional beamforming-based analysis is conducted from the real field measurements. This analysis comprises beam switching, beam-based localization, and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) definition toward network management.