Experimentation in 5G and beyond Networks: State of the Art and the Way Forward.

After first being standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in Release 15, 5th Generation (5G) mobile systems have been rapidly deployed worldwide [...].

Positioning by Multicell Fingerprinting in Urban NB-IoT Networks.

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) has quickly become a leading technology in the deployment of IoT systems and services, owing to its appealing features in terms of coverage and energy efficiency, as well as compatibility with existing mobile networks. Increasingly, IoT services and applications require location information to be paired with data collected by devices; NB-IoT still lacks, however, reliable positioning methods. Time-based techniques inherited from long-term evolution (LTE) are not yet widely available in existing networks and are expected to perform poorly on NB-IoT signals due to their narrow bandwidth. This investigation proposes a set of strategies for NB-IoT positioning based on fingerprinting that use coverage and radio information from multiple cells. The proposed strategies were evaluated on two large-scale datasets made available under an open-source license that include experimental data from multiple NB-IoT operators in two large cities: Oslo, Norway, and Rome, Italy. Results showed that the proposed strategies, using a combination of coverage and radio information from multiple cells, outperform current state-of-the-art approaches based on single cell fingerprinting, with a minimum average positioning error of about 20 m when using data for a single operator that was consistent across the two datasets vs. about 70 m for the current state-of-the-art approaches. The combination of data from multiple operators and data smoothing further improved positioning accuracy, leading to a minimum average positioning error below 15 m in both urban environments.

A Modular Experimentation Methodology for 5G Deployments: The 5GENESIS Approach.

The high heterogeneity of 5G use cases requires the extension of the traditional per-component testing procedures provided by certification organizations, in order to devise and incorporate methodologies that cover the testing requirements from vertical applications and services. In this paper, we introduce an experimentation methodology that is defined in the context of the 5GENESIS project, which aims at enabling both the testing of network components and validation of E2E KPIs. The most important contributions of this methodology are its modularity and flexibility, as well as the open-source software that was developed for its application, which enable lightweight adoption of the methodology in any 5G testbed. We also demonstrate how the methodology can be used, by executing and analyzing different experiments in a 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) deployment at the University of Malaga. The key findings of the paper are an initial 5G performance assessment and KPI analysis and the detection of under-performance issues at the application level. Those findings highlight the need for reliable testing and validation procedures towards a fair benchmarking of generic 5G services and applications.