CHEAP 5G: DECT NR+ for Tactile Internet With Human In The Loop Application

5G communication networks are suitable to realize Tactile Internet with Human in the Loop application due to the envisaged latency promises. Currently, 5G Release 15 is widely deployed. Latency performance to control robots or enable humans to engage with the metaverse will require higher releases. WiFi is widely used due to its cost, but has poor latency performance due to the “listen-before-talk” requirement in the ISM bands. Therefore, solutions that combine low cost and high latency performance are needed. This paper presents a detailed performance evaluation of a 5G DECT NR+ testbed with a focus on latency and data rate. While commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) 5G testbeds are still very expensive, we present a low-cost solution to achieve similar or even better latency performance with NR+. The testbed is composed of two NR+ platforms and will explore different settings such as packet length and Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS). The main result of the paper is that non-optimized COTS DECT NR+ can provide latency values of 2 ms to 8 ms and a data rate of 2.3 Mbit/s to 2.5 Mbit/s.