Simulated and practical approach to assess the reliability of the 5G communications for the Uu interface

This paper proposes an evaluation of the performance of 5G communication between a user equipment (UE), which can be a car, and a 5G base station (gNB), under the influence of different numbers of UEs connected to that base station. There are two approaches to this communication evaluation: i) simulated mode, using Simu5G, which is a simulator for 5G New Radio (NR) networks; ii) a practical way using a hardware setup defined on the basis of a SIM8200EA-M2 module in order to test a real-life scenario. Various performance indicators are tracked and also compared, such as Signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), Channel Quality Indicator (CQI), and End-to-End (E2E) Delay in order to analyze the effect of network load on 5G communication between the UE and gNB.