Outdoor 5G Channel Measurement using COTS UEs

Platform: ARA COTS platform

Resources Needed:

• Ericsson Base Station: RP 6647 (base band), AIR 6419 (mid-band radio), AIR 5322 (mmWave radio)

• COTS UE: Quectel RG530 and computer hosting the Quectel radio.

Description: The experiment is designed to measure the wireless channel characteristics using COTS UE from an already established Ericsson RAN. Please note that in this experiment, we do not establish any link. However, we measure the characteristics of an existing link. The experiment uses a container only at the UE with a script for measuring the channel characteristics. The following figure shows the Ericsson network used for the experiment.

Detailed Steps

1. Login to ARA portal with your username and password.

   Note

   If you are a first time user, it is highly recommended to run the Hello World experiment experiment first to get familiarized with the interface and the portal.

2. Create a reservation using the Project -> Reservations -> Leases tab from the dashboard with the following attributes:

   • Site: Ames

   • Resource Type: AraRAN

   • Device Type: User Equipment

   • Device ID: 000

   Note

   For this experiment, you DO NOT need to reserve any Base Station node. The measurement is performed only at the UE side.

   In general, you can use any UE which is equipped with COTS Quectel radio. The following table provides the list of UEs that support this experiment.

   List of Supported Fixed-location UEs for COTS Measurement

   Site	Resource Type	Device Type	Device ID
   Ames	AraRAN	User Equipment	000 and 140
   Curtiss Farm	AraRAN	User Equipment	000, 001, and 002
   AgronomyFarm	AraRAN	User Equipment	000, 001, 010, 020, 031, and 035
   FeedMill	AraRAN	User Equipment	000 and 001
   Ames	AraRAN	User Equipment (Mobile)	Device ID

   List of Supported Mobile UEs for COTS Measurement

   Site	Resource Type	Device Type	Device ID
   Ames	AraRAN	User Equipment	120

   Note

   To check the availability of the mobile UE, navigate to Project -> Summary -> Mobile UE Map from the dashboard. This page displays a live map showing the mobile UE (i.e., the bus equipped with the UE) and its current location. A green bus icon indicates that the mobile UE is ready for experimentation, while a red bus icon indicates that the bus is outside ARA’s coverage area and not ready for experimentation.

3. Launch a container equipped using the container image arawirelesshub/cots:baseline for fixed nodes and arawirelesshub/cots:mobile for mobile node. You can keep the other container attributes according to your choice.

4. Once the container is launched, take a note on the floating IP and SSH to the container via the ARA jumpbox. Detailed instructions for accessing the container via jumpbox can be found here.

5. In the container, run the following commands to start the measurement script.

   cd
   ./measure_cots.py -t 5
   

   Here, 5 represents the time in seconds we want to execute the measurement script and the samples are collected every 1 second. You can provide the experiment duration as required.

   For fixed UEs, the command produces the following output.

   

   For mobile UEs, the command provides output that include the UE location (latitude and longitude) as well.

   

   Note

   Please note that the mobile node generates output only when the bus is within the coverage region of the ARA base stations. You can check the Project -> Summary -> Mobile UE Map menu in the ARA portal to view the bus’s position. It is recommended to run the command for at least 40 minutes (provided the bus is shown in green), to ensures that sufficient COTS metrics are collected.

6. The command in Step 5 also generates an output file named cots_YYYY_MM_DD-HH:MM:SS.csv (in CSV format) with the measurement data including the timestamp of the sample, band, ARFCN, RSRP, SINR, RSRQ, Cell ID, and Cell Name. You can see the content of the generated file using the following command. Note that the timestamp in the filename represents the time at which the measurement started.

   cat <filename>
   

   An example of the content of the file from the above command is shown below.

   

   Note

   The last column in the CSV file represents the Cell Name, which takes the form ResourceName-SectorNumber. For example, WilsonHall-BS-000-2 indicates the 2nd sector of the base station specified as WilsonHall-BS-000.

7. If you want to save output into a custom file, you can use the -o option as follows.

   ./measure_cots.py -t 5 -o output.csv
   

   The above command will generate the file named output.csv. If you run the command multiple times using the same filename, the output will be appended to the same file.

Tip

If you want to perform weather measurements along with the RAN experiments, refer to ARA Weather APIs.