5G-NR Latency Field Performance for Immersive Live Video
Jin Yang, Andreas J. Andersson, Susan Sanders
Abstract
Low latency and high reliability are major superiority of 5G New Radio (5G-NR) on top of enhanced mobile broadband. 5G end-to-end network architecture supports flexible routing of traffic from remote radio and distributed units to various user traffic destinations. This combined with emerging Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enables immersive live video experiences with much lower latency and higher reliability than that of enhanced mobile broadband services. Those enhancements are important for various vertical sectors, such as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X), entertainment, healthcare, industrial IoT and metaverse. In this paper, 5G-NR latency performances are studied systematically for the first time in a commercial network under adverse radio fading environments. Both the latency and the latency variation increase with a higher video data rate and Block Error Rate. 5G-NR mobility and handover performance are evaluated for a ubiquitous consistent latency. End-to-end average latency of 4.5 to 15.5 ms are demonstrated in a wide area network. The impact of devices and Connected Mode Discontinuous Reception (cDRX) on latency are studied. The solution to tradeoff latency with battery life are proposed. Future work and various means to enhance immersive video experience are explored.