5G enabled smart cities: A real-world evaluation and analysis of 5G using a pilot smart city application

Ubiquitous sensing in smart cities is expected to be one of the key beneficiaries of the high bandwidth and low latency capabilities of 5G. However, current 5G deployments still have low population coverage, and are unlikely to reach global coverage of above 80% before 2028. This means that new smart city applications are likely to experience a combination of 4G and 5G, limiting their data-intensive capabilities. Thus, it is necessary to assess the ability of current 5G deployments to support emerging smart city applications, and how they perform in 5G environments. Existing performance evaluations focus either on the 5G core or use instantaneous speed tests, which do not effectively assess the suitability of 5G deployments for smart city applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation and analysis of real-world 5G network performance observed through the outcomes of a pilot smart city application, an innovative mobile 5G Internet of Things (IoT) solution to automatically identify and report road assets requiring maintenance. The pilot smart city application was deployed on 11 waste collection service trucks over a 6 month period (June 2022–Dec 2022). We undertook both application-specific and application independent network performance evaluation to assess the ability of the 5G deployment to support uninterrupted smart city services. Our analysis shows that while 5G is capable of supporting mobile video streaming applications, there are significant variations in network performance, which may make it unsuitable for applications that require higher data intensive or near real-time responsiveness.