Demystifying 5G Traffic Patterns with an Indoor RAN Measurement Campaign

The deployment of commercial 5G network is gaining momentum while research is already moving towards more advanced features. Currently, the lack of an easy-to-construct, open-source testbed that can support commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices has hindered academic research. In this paper, we build an open-source over-the-air testbed leveraging advanced features of 5G radio access and core networks developed by the OpenAirInterface (OAI) project. We evaluate the quality of service (QoS) achievable using this testbed and provide visibility into the compute consumption of individual components. Additionally, we present a method to utilize WiFi devices for experimenting with 5G QoS. We collect resource consumption analytics from the 5G user plane in correlation to raw traffic patterns. Our results show that the OAI testbed sustains sub-20ms latency with up to 80Mbps throughput over a 25m range using COTS devices. Device connection remains stable while supporting different use cases such as AR/VR, online gaming, video streaming and voice over IP (VoIP). Finally, we illustrate how these popular use cases affect the CPU utilization in the user plane. This provides insight into the capabilities of existing 5G solutions by demystifying the resource needs of specific use cases. All our results can be recreated using COTS equipment.