Performance Analysis and Comparison of Full-Fledged 5G Standalone Experimental TDD Testbeds in Single & Multi-UE Scenarios

Open-source software and Commercial Off-The-Shelf hardware are finally paving their way into the 5G world, resulting in a proliferation of experimental 5G testbeds. Surprisingly, very few studies have been published on the comparative analysis of testbeds with different hardware and software elements. In this paper, we first introduce a precise nomenclature to characterize a 5G-standalone single-cell testbed based on its constituent elements and main configuration parameters. We then build 30 distinct such testbeds and systematically analyze their performance with an emphasis on element interoperability (by considering different combinations of hardware and software elements from different sources), the number and type of User Equipment (UE) as well as the Radio Access Network hardware and software elements to address the following questions: 1) How is the performance (in terms of bit rate and latency) impacted by different elements? 2) How does the number of UEs affect these results? 3) What is the impact of the user(s)' location(s) on the performance? 4) What is the impact of the UE type on these results? 5) How far does each testbed provide coverage? 6) And finally, what is the effect of the computing resources available to each open-source software? This study focuses on TDD testbeds.