학술논문

An Empirical Study of 5G: Effect of Edge on Transport Protocol and Application Performance
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing IEEE Trans. on Mobile Comput. Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on. 23(4):3172-3186 Apr, 2024
Subject
Computing and Processing
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Signal Processing and Analysis
5G mobile communication
Throughput
Millimeter wave communication
Edge computing
Servers
Delays
Frequency measurement
5G
network measurement
5G coverage
edge computing
transport protocol
network latency
congestion control
Language
ISSN
1536-1233
1558-0660
2161-9875
Abstract
In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on operational 5G networks deployed across different frequency bands (mmWave and sub-6GHz) and server locations (mobile edge and Internet cloud). Specifically, we assess 5G performance in both uplink and downlink across multiple operators’ networks. We then carry out extensive comparisons of transport-layer protocols using ten different algorithms in full-fledged 5G networks, including an edge computing environment. Finally, we evaluate representative mobile applications over the 5G network with and without edge servers. Our comprehensive measurements provide several insights that affect the experience of 5G users: (i) With a 5G edge server, existing TCP congestion control algorithms can achieve throughput up to 1.8Gbps with only a single flow. (ii) The maximum TCP receive buffer size, which is set by off-the-shelf 5G phones, can limit the throughput performance of 5G networks, which is not observed in 4G LTE-A networks. (iii) Despite significant latency gains in download-centric applications, the 5G edge service provides limited benefits to CPU-intensive tasks or those that use significant uplink bandwidth. To our knowledge, this is the first measurement-driven understanding of 5G edge computing “in the wild,” which can provide an answer to how edge computing would perform in real 5G networks.