A Smart Campus Multi-Access Communication Infrastructure: Performance of the 5G Side

A well-known example of a smart environment is the smart campus. We use this term to refer to University campuses that are organized according to the smart city paradigm, despite on a smaller scale. As a matter of fact, in both scenarios users having very different requests exploit computation and communication technologies for carrying out diverse activities in multifunctional buildings. Additionally, the smart campus also includes the issues of smart mobility, since multimodal transportation is another crucial task. In this work, it suggested the combined use of unlicensed LoRaWAN LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Networks) and 5G-licensed mobile technologies for smart campuses. In particular, the focus is on the evaluation of performance obtainable using a 5 G Standalone (SA) infrastructure, by means of a purposely designed setup based on opensource core and radio access networks. Metrics of interests are proposed and defined for characterizing experimental scenarios in presence of (controlled) interfering traffic sources. Delays in the order of tens of milliseconds have been measured for both the one-way and two-way trip times. In particular, we find that 90% of the round-trip delays are in the range $\in[39-40] \mathrm{ms}$, indicating a limited spread.