Real-life V2X Measurement Results for 5G NSA Performance on a High-speed Motorway

One of the key application target areas of 5G mobile technologies is the Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communication. The first 5G deployments for Non-Standalone Architecture (NSA) have been successful worldwide, although the success itself should be supported by published performance results - which are still hard to find. This paper aims to make up for this missing information in the area of 5G NSA capabilities for fast-moving vehicles. Since the core network in the NSA is the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) for 4G, network slicing is not yet an option, and other guarantees for keeping certain Quality of Service (QoS) promises are limited. The contributions of the current paper are twofold: first, it describes a reference measurement methodology for V2X communication measurements under motorway conditions, and second, it provides initial real-life, practical results for the 5G NSA setup - which can already provide better KPIs than 4G, and can only get better with the advent of 5G Standalone (SA) architecture deployments. The results described here are part of a comprehensive measurement campaign for autonomous vehicles and their Digital Twins, carried out in June 2020 by BME, TU Graz, Magyar Telekom, ZALAZone, vehicle and ITC vendors, and the Hungarian Road Authority on the M86 national freeway.