Performance Evaluation of 5G Standalone Seamless Home Routed Roaming for Connected Mobility in Cross-Border Scenarios

Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM) and Future Railway Mobile Communications Systems (FRMCS) services usually require uninterrupted seamless connectivity. However, in cross-border scenarios, legacy roaming techniques lead to interruption times in the range of one to two minutes, which results unsuitable for the provisioning of demanding CAM and FRMCS services. This paper presents the implementation of state-of-the-art roaming optimization techniques in both the 5G Core and radio access network, including a novel radio optimization handover mechanism for home-routed roaming (HRR) that enables the completion of roaming procedures in 5G Standalone (SA) networks with short interruption times. In addition, a network key performance indicator (KPI) tool is presented to measure the network performance in terms of latency, throughput, and interruption time during roaming. Unlike previous works, static and dynamic performance evaluations are performed in a realistic environment over 5G SA networks deployed on the Mediterranean cross-border corridor between Spain and France. The proposed optimization mechanism yields average interruption time measurements in the range between 135ms and 155ms, enabling seamless service continuity in crossborder scenarios.