Demystifying Resource Allocation Policies in Operational 5G mmWave Networks

5G mmWave is being rapidly deployed by all major mobile operators. With the technology still in its infancy, several early research works analyze the performance of operational 5G mmWave networks. Nonetheless, these measurement studies primarily focus on single-user performance, leaving the sharing and resource allocation policies largely unexplored. In this paper, we fill this gap by conducting the, to our best knowledge, first systematic study of resource allocation policies of current 5G mmWave mobile network deployments through an extensive measurement campaign across four major US cities and two major mobile operators. Our study reveals that resource allocation among multiple flows is strictly governed by the cellular operators and flows are not allowed to compete with each other in a shared queue. Operators employ simple threshold-based policies and often over-allocate resources to new flows with low traffic demands or reserve some capacity for future usage. Interestingly, these policies vary not only among operators but also for a single operator in different cities. We also discuss a number of anomalous behaviors we observed in our experiments across different cities and operators.