EE6: 5G Handover using Quectel SPN

This is one of the sample experiments for Ericsson 5G network.  

Note to the Experimenters: Ericsson experiments are Non-Canonical experiments, meaning they don't follow the Canonical experiments model with Development or Emulation mode, so the experimenters are required to follow the procedure as described in Section 4.6.1 for Ericsson experiments.

1) Experiment Objective

The main goal of this experiment is to show the support for 5G handover on the AERPAW testbed using Ericsson 5G network and a small portable node (SPN). The base station network is a 5G NSA network with two sectors with cell Ids 1 and 2. The handover operation shall be validated by logging the Cell ID of the serving sector along with throughput and other RF and PHY parameters. 

2) Test Description

The testbed for this experiment comprises of a Small Portable node (SPN) with Quectel modem and an Ericsson 5G base station. The SPN is mounted on an UAV to run the experiment and collect the logs along a preprogrammed vehicle trajectory in the field.  The experimenter specifies the vehicle flight plan for which the measurements need to be done, for example, PF7 a default plan used for this sample experiment.  As the handover experiment typically requires the UE in a RRC connected state, the experimenter also specifies the type of traffic to be used, for example iPerf TCP as used in this sample experiment.

In summary,  for this experiment the HW & SW Resources used:  

Ericsson 5G NSA Network

SPN with Quectel modem as APRN 

CC1 as AFN (for IPerf Server)

A SAM UAV 

Traffic type:  IPerf TCP Downlink

Vehicle plan file: Default plan PF6  

Note: The above is the type of information an Experimenter is expected to provide in the AERPAW Experiment Information Request Form.

Note: The 5G network is already preconfigured and the portable node is pre-programmed to capture default parameters, so the user is not required to do anything. 

As part of the experiment, the 5G RF and Physical layer parameters as well as throughput are logged in realtime along the vehicle path. At the end of the experiment, RF and PHY parameters of the Serving cell logs as well as traffic and vehicle logs be collected and provided to the experimenter.

Preconfigured 5G network configuration:

The 5G network radios supports band n78 for NR carrier operating in 3.3 - 3.5 GHz frequency band and band 66 for LTE carrier operating in 1.7/2.1 GHz frequency band. The 5G NSA network is pre-configured as in Section 6.1.6.

Preprogrammed Radio logging configuration:

Quectel logging tool logs the following parameters on the serving cell.

Cell ID 

RSRP

RSRQ

SINR

CQI

RI

Throughput

Preparing Vehicle plan file 

This sample experiment uses a plan file PF7 given in Section 5.1.2.2. as shown here with the following parameters - 

30m altitude, 10 m/s speed, 1278 m distance, zigzag flight path.

There are more sample vehicle mission plan files available here to choose from. In that case, the experimenter specifies the mission plan file that they would like to use in the AERPAW Experiment Information Request Form.

Alternatively,  the experimenter can create their own mission plan file by following the procedure given in Section 5.1.2, and submit it by sending it to AERPAW Ops email id aerpaw-operations@ncsu.edu.

Preparing Traffic file

This experiment uses a IPerf traffic. The Traffic scripts in the CC1 AFN runs the Iperf server while the iPerf client is started at the UE in the SPN. 

As the experiment requires the UE modem to be in an RRC-Connected state, an iPerf traffic is started between the Portable node and AERPAW fixed node. The RF and PHY parameters of the Serving cell logs as well as traffic and vehicle logs be collected and the recorded data shall be available in the Results folder.

3) Running an Experiment on the Testbed:

To run the experiment on the testbed, the SPN with Quectel modem is prepared with the vehicle plan file, iperf client and the RF logging as well as the iPerf server at the AFN CCI node. At the start of the experiment, the Quectel UE in the SPN gets attached to the Ericsson 5G network, and the AT&T modem is connected to AT&T network.  After attaching to the 5G network, the SPN (UE) camps on the serving cell. Once the SPN is ready, the experiment is started that starts the Iperf client to initiate downlink traffic from the IPerf server at the AFN, and starts logging the radio, vehicle and traffic data. The experiment continues with the UAV flight as planned in the vehicle plan file, and the logging of the data continues till the end flight. In the end, the experiment is stopped, that stops logging of the data. 

4) Results:

The experiment generates timestamped measurement logs under the /root/Results folder. There are three different data are logged: Radio log and the vehicle flight log. For radio log the serving cell RF and PHY parameters are logged into a separate log files.  

The Results folder will have these log files:

1.  Vehicle logging

• yyyy-mm-dd_hh_mm_ss_vehicle_log.txt

• yyyy-mm-dd_hh_mm_ss _vehicleOut.txt

2.  Radio logging

• Quectel_log_yyyy_mm_dd_hh_mm_ss.log  (raw data)

• Serving_cell_Params_ENDC_yyyy_mm_dd_hh_mm_ss.csv

• Basic_and_Other_Params_ yyyy_mm_dd_hh_mm_ss.csv

Postprocessing:

The CSV logs can be converted to kml and plots using Matlab scripts.

Sample log file output

Serving cell RF parameters (from Quectel_log_xxx.log file)

Example Results:

Selected KPIs (Cell ID, RSRP) along with the throughput from the post-processing of the sample experiment data are shown on the images below.