Practical Commercial 5G Standalone (SA) Uplink Throughput Prediction

Abstract

While the 5G New Radio (NR) network promises a huge uplift of the uplink throughput, the improvement can only be seen when the User Equipment (UE) is connected to the high-frequency millimeter wave (mmWave) band. With the rise of uplink-intensive smartphone applications such as the real-time transmission of UHD 4K/8K videos, and Virtual Reality (VR)/Augmented Reality (AR) contents, uplink throughput prediction plays a huge role in maximizing the users' quality of experience (QoE). In this paper, we propose using a ConvLSTM-based neural network to predict the future uplink throughput based on past uplink throughput and RF parameters. The network is trained using the data from real-world drive tests on commercial 5G SA networks while riding commuter trains, which accounted for various frequency bands, handover, and blind spots. To make sure our model can be practically implemented, we then limited our model to only use the information available via Android API, then evaluate our model using the data from both commuter trains and other methods of transportation. The results show that our model reaches an average prediction accuracy of 98.9\% with an average RMSE of 1.80 Mbps across all unseen evaluation scenarios