Investigating Handover Behavior with 5G and Beyond TurboRAN Testbed

Abstract

With a recent roll out of Fifth Generation (5G), the focus of cellular industry and research community is now turned towards Sixth Generation (6G). The aim of 6G is to provide substantially higher capacity, seamless connectivity, better energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, reliability, and latency among others. To achieve this goal, new technologies and concepts are being proposed, however, to demonstrate their actual performance, it is important to integrate them in practical networks and then analyze the performance. Nowadays, testbeds are considered as an essential tool to evaluate realistic performance of cellular networks. Nevertheless, deploying a large-scale testbed often involves complex steps including network, site planning and choosing the appropriate hardware. In this work, we present our newly deployed TurboRAN testbed, and report all the findings, that are indispensable for evaluating different concepts of next generation cellular networks. The TurboRAN testbed is a complete integrated mobile cellular network deployed over 300 000 m2 area with the combination of indoor and outdoor cell deployment. It supports a variety of essential cellular networks features and aims to offer free access to the community for conducting experiments. In order to illustrate some of the capabilities of TurboRAN, in this work, we also investigate handover procedure and mobility management in different settings. In a nutshell, this work serves as a guide for readers who are planning to deploy a testbed for 5G and Beyond testing networks.