Experimental Validation and Field Trials of 5G Cross-Border Connectivity

The availability of B5G (and 5G) connectivity is an essential aspect that fosters improving traffic safety, sustainable mobility, and promoting innovation. Specifically, the availability of this connectivity along the roads and across the border of the European countries is an important goal of the European Commission for the advancement of the European Union states, as can be observed from the magnitude of funded projects. In this paper, we perform an experimental validation of using an inter-PLMN solution to allow cross-border connectivity, PLMN switching, and handover, where PLMN stands for Public Land Mobile Networks. The experiments were performed in Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) laboratory and at one of the Estonian-Latvian border crossing points. The average handover time, and round-trip time (RTT) (in the lab and field) are measured and are in the order of milliseconds. The average RTT ping delay is between 23 and 27 ms at TalTech and between 25 and 85 ms (owing to the transport network delay) at the Estonian-Latvian border. Therefore, based on experimental verification, the presented cross-border inter-PLMN solution is confirmed to be suitable for low-latency cross-border applications due to its low interruption time.