Street-Level Cellular Networks Monitoring in the 5G Era

Researchers from both academia and industry have started exploring the potential of sixth generation cellular networks, envisioning novel concepts and futuristic capabilities. An empirical analysis of real-world fifth generation (5G) deployments serves a compass to direct the next stage of evolution and provides insights on the additional improvements required for the future services and applications. However, acquiring real-world measurement data at a city or county scale poses substantial challenges in terms of time and cost. To address this issue, this paper presents a practical and cost-effective data collection testbed and a methodology that harnesses the existing services provided by municipal council authorities, including curbside waste collections to generate large-scale realtime network coverage maps. Rich datasets of measurement data collected from multiple fourth generation (4G) and 5G cells over seven months in Nottingham, United Kingdom (UK) for all four major UK network operators, namely EE, Vodafone, O2, and Three Mobile, are provided. These large datasets can be utilized for analyzing network deployment options, coverage, and future service provisioning as well as designing and training artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to further optimize the mobile networks. In addition, the paper reviews the latest empirical 5G network analysis tools and techniques, which were not seen in previous generations.