Comparative Performance Evaluation of mmWave 5G NR and LTE in a Campus Scenario

The extremely high data rates provided by communications in the millimeter-length (mmWave) frequency bands can help address the unprecedented demands of next-generation wireless communications. However, atmospheric attenuation and high propagation loss severely limit the coverage of mmWave networks. To overcome these challenges, multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) provides beamforming capabilities and high-gain steerable antennas to expand communication coverage at mmWave frequencies. The main contribution of this paper is the performance evaluation of mmWave communications on top of the recently released NR standard for 5G cellular networks. Furthermore, we compare the performance of NR with the 4G long-term evolution (LTE) standard on a highly realistic campus environment. We consider physical layer constraints such as transmit power, ambient noise, receiver noise figure, and practical antenna gain in both cases, and examine bitrate and area coverage as the criteria to benchmark the performance. We also show the impact of MIMO technology to improve the performance of the 5G NR cellular network. Our evaluation demonstrates that 5G NR provides on average 6.7 times bitrate improvement without remarkable coverage degradation.