Cost-effective Measurements of 5G Radio Resources Allocation for Telecom Market Regulator's Monitoring

The Regulatory Authority monitors and regulates the telecom market at a national-wide range. One of its main tasks is to put spectrum at disposal of the Mobile Network Operators (MNO) for serving the increase number of users and services. For this scope, the Regulator needs to have an independent estimation of the usage of the radio resources by the operators, so that it may anticipate future needs and to initiate actions (e.g., liberation of frequency bands) directed to fulfill the demands of the market. This paper presents a methodology for Regulator-triggered monitoring of 5G radio resources allocation. The requirements of the methodology are: (1) monitoring measurements must be external to the network, (2) information from the MNO is limited to the data of the radio infrastructure, such as localization and technical data of the antennas, and (3) any measurements need to be cost-effective since it is supposed that the Regulator will make extended test campaigns through the whole national territory. Our results of 5G measurements validate the methodology and show the limitations of the estimation of radio resource allocation.