Demo: Decoding Control Information Passively from Standalone 5G Network

5G New Radio cellular networks are designed to provide high Quality of Service for application on wirelessly connected devices. However, changing conditions of the wireless last hop can degrade application performance, and the applications have no visibility into the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). Most 5G network operators run closed networks, limiting the potential for co-design with the wider-area internet and user applications. This paper demonstrates NR-Scope, a passive, incrementally-deployable, and independently-deployable Standalone 5G network telemetry system that can passively measure fine-grained RAN capacity, latency, and retransmission information. Application servers can take advantage of the measurements to achieve better millisecond scale, application-level decisions on offered load and bit rate adaptation than end-to-end latency measurements or end-to-end packet losses currently permit. We demonstrate the performance of NR-Scope by decoding the downlink control information (DCI) for downlink and uplink traffic of a 5G Standalone base station in real-time.