Poster: Characterizing Performance and Power for mmWave 5G on Commodity Smartphones

During the first half of this year, three major operators in the US have announced their 5G deployment, which indicates the advent of next generation networks. To reduce the time to market, carriers utilize 5G NR for data plane operations while retaining the existing 4G infrastructure for control plane operations in what is called NSA (Non-Standalone) deployment mode defined as 5G system Phase I. EN-DC is a core technology of NSA 5G which supports the introduction of 5G services under 4G infrastructure. It enables a UE to connect to LTE and NR at the same time whereas the control plane connection is handled by LTE infrastructure. In this case, the UE will have only one single RRC state machine. Note that LTE RRC state machine contains RRC_CONNECTED and RRC_IDLE with different DRX settings while NR RRC has an additional state called RRC_INACTIVE. In this work, we aim to explore network and power characteristics for NSA 5G which introduces a surprisingly high data rate.