Performance Comparison of 5G NR Uplink MIMO and Uplink Carrier Aggregations on Commercial Network
Henry Shao, Kasidis Arunruangsirilert

TL;DR
This paper evaluates the uplink throughput of 5G NR UL-MIMO and UL-CA on a commercial network, revealing that UL-MIMO often underperforms except in strong RF conditions, where it can still be effective.
Contribution
It provides a real-world performance comparison of UL-MIMO and UL-CA on a commercial 5G network across various RF environments and transportation modes.
Findings
UL-MIMO often yields slower throughput than UL-CA in most scenarios.
UL-MIMO performs adequately in strong RF conditions.
UL-CA is more beneficial in weaker RF environments.
Abstract
Demands for uplink on mobile networks are increasing with the rapid development of social media platforms, 4K/8K content creation, IoT applications, and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband. As a result, Uplink MIMO (UL-MIMO) and Uplink Carrier Aggregation (UL-CA) have been widely deployed for the first time on commercial 5G networks. UL-MIMO enables the transmission of two data streams on one frequency band in strong RF conditions, theoretically doubling throughput and efficiency. On the other hand, UL-CA allows for simultaneous upload on greater channel widths, allowing more resources to be assigned to a single UE for higher throughput. In the United States, T-Mobile USA, a mobile network operator (MNO), has deployed network-wide 5G Standalone (SA), along with UL-MIMO on Time Division Duplex (TDD) band n41 and UL-CA between TDD and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) NR bands. In this…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced MIMO Systems Optimization · Full-Duplex Wireless Communications · Wireless Networks and Protocols
