Measuring Communication Service Availability for 5G Networks

5G is designed to support various industrial applications with a wide range of service requirements for end-to-end latency, reliability and availability. This paper defines two methods to assess communication service availability using handset generated short interval round-trip-time measurements. The first method is based on the sum of availability periods whereas the second method uses the count of round-trip-time values. The methods are compared in two test scenarios. The first scenario analyzes the feasibility of commercial 5G standalone deployments to meet the communication service availability requirement constraint by the maximum allowed end-to-end latency. The second scenario compares mmWave deployment with 3.5 GHz deployment. Results from the both tests emphasize the importance of minimizing service interruptions, and optimizing the network and device performances for industrial environments.