Performance Evaluation and Comparison between SA and NSA 5G Networks in Indoor Environment

Providing omnipresent 5G cellular connectivity is very appealing to advance a wide range of use cases and industry verticals. However, it is expected that the commercial rollout of 5G networks will be progressive starting from 5G radio access network (RAN) integrated with existing 4G networks, i.e., non- standalone (NSA), to full 5G architecture with both 5G RAN and 5G core, i.e standalone (SA). Hence, it is of utmost importance to evaluate and compare the performance of these SA and NSA networks so as to examine if the requirements of 5G-reliant use cases can be met. In this regard, this paper conducts preliminary field trials for SA and NSA 5G networks based on a self-contained 5G base station. The performance of both networks is compared under different system setups, and key performance indicators (KPIs) such as data rate and latency are measured. Preliminary results reveal that the achievable uplink rate from SA 5G networks slightly outperforms that of the NSA counterpart under the same 5G RAN setup. Moreover, the network latency of SA and NSA networks are shown to be comparable.

I. Introduction

With the emergence of new use cases and applications in the telco mobile space, the fourth-generation (4G) mobile communication limitations have become a bottleneck standing in the way of mobile networks adoption in a number of strategic industry verticals with specific and stringent requirements. These verticals include, but not limited to, virtual reality (VR), factories of the future (FoF), smart transportation, smart cities and buildings, and smart ports. The fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication is introduced to enable mobile and ubiquitous communications for such industry verticals as it designed with key pillars, particularly, programmability, openness, resource sharing, and edgification [1]. This includes improvements in both the core and radio access network (RAN), which warrants high multi-gigabit speeds, ultra-high reliability, low-latency, and high connection density. This paved the road for the introduction of three service classes referred to as slices, namely, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low- latency communications (URLLC).