Arvind Narayanan, Eman Ramadan, Jason Carpenter,
Qingxu Liu, Yu
Liu, Feng Qian, Zhi-Li Zhang
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Minnesota
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.
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
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Technical
Talk
Presentation Slides
Want to cite us? Click for Bibtex entry.
@inproceedings{10.1145/3366423.3380169, author = {Narayanan, Arvind and Ramadan, Eman and Carpenter, Jason and Liu, Qingxu and Liu, Yu and Qian, Feng and Zhang, Zhi-Li}, title = {A First Look at Commercial 5G Performance on Smartphones}, year = {2020}, isbn = {9781450370233}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3366423.3380169}, doi = {10.1145/3366423.3380169}, booktitle = {Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020}, pages = {894–905}, numpages = {12}, location = {Taipei, Taiwan}, series = {WWW ’20} }
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.
This project was supported in part by NSF under Grants CNS-1917424, CNS-1903880, CNS-1915122, CNS-1618339, CNS-1617729, CNS-1814322, CNS-1831140, CNS-1836772, and CNS-1901103.