Performance Comparison of 5G NR Uplink MIMO and Uplink Carrier Aggregations on Commercial Network

Henry Shao; Kasidis Arunruangsirilert

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2511.16751

Performance Comparison of 5G NR Uplink MIMO and Uplink Carrier Aggregations on Commercial Network

Henry Shao·Kasidis Arunruangsirilert

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

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 paper, the uplink throughput performance of UL-MIMO and UL-CA will be evaluated on the commercial T-Mobile 5G network on a variety of RF environments and modes of transportation. It was found that, even with the efficiency gains, UL-MIMO yields slower uplink throughput in most scenarios. However, in stronger RF conditions, UL-MIMO can provide an adequate user experience, so capacity can be conserved by reserving UL-CA for UE in weaker RF conditions.

Explore related subjects

cs.NI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Henry Shao, Kasidis Arunruangsirilert. 2025-11-20. Performance Comparison of 5G NR Uplink MIMO and Uplink Carrier Aggregations on Commercial Network. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16751

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

CSI Simulation: Why Additive Noise Fails and How to Fix It

Channel State Information (CSI) has become a widely used wireless channel sensing modality for applications such as indoor localization, activity recognition, and respiration monitoring. Because collecting labeled data under every target condition is impractical, training CSI-based models often relies on simulated data produced by adding noise or perturbations to recorded channel estimates, most commonly additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). This practice assumes that the receiver chain between the antenna and the channel estimator is linear and gain-invariant. We test this assumption empirically using RF jamming as a controlled perturbation on 6 commodity receivers across 2 indoor environments. The assumption does not hold. Automatic gain control compresses the channel estimate multiplicatively before digitization, producing amplitude distributions that no additive noise variance can reproduce. To close the resulting fidelity gap, we propose M_QTC, a measurement-calibrated model that learns the per-subcarrier distribution transformation through quantile mapping, temporal filtering, and copula-based cross-subcarrier reordering. M_QTC reduces amplitude error 8-fold and closes 89% of the aggregate fidelity gap across four complementary dimensions. The improvement transfers directly to downstream tasks, where 5 classifiers from different families trained on M_QTC-simulated data recover 93% of real-data jamming detection performance, while AWGN-trained classifiers remain near random decision.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

BALANCE: Hybrid Autoregressive-Speculative LLM Inference at the Network Edge

Edge inference is a promising paradigm to provide large language model (LLM) inference services in next-generation mobile networks. LLM inference mainly relies on two approaches: Autoregressive decoding (AD) generates output tokens sequentially, resulting in long latency; Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates inference by using a small language model (SLM) to generate multiple draft tokens for LLM verification, but incurs extra memory costs. Due to this latency-memory tradeoff, neither approach alone can efficiently serve users with heterogeneous demands under limited edge computing resources. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid autoregressive-speculative inference (BALANCE) framework for edge LLM inference. In BALANCE, an edge server hosts both an SLM and an LLM, admits users, assigns each admitted user to the AD or SD mode, and performs the two modes simultaneously. To maximize the number of served users, we formulate a task throughput maximization problem to jointly determine user admission and computing resource allocation between AD and SD under user latency requirements and server memory constraints. Since the problem is NP-hard, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm that transforms the original problem into two sub-problems and obtains a sub-optimal solution with a constant approximation guarantee. Experiments demonstrate that BALANCE consistently outperforms conventional AD and SD and significantly improves task throughput.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Zero-Knowledge Remote Adversarial Attack against Wi-Fi-based Human Activity Recognition for Privacy Protection

The growing capability of Wi-Fi devices to identify human activities using channel state information (CSI) raises privacy concerns. To counter this threat, we propose GRAW, an adversary system, acting as a privacy defender, that degrades the human activity recognition (HAR) system at the user device by perturbing the router's signals that the device uses to estimate CSI. GRAW employs generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) to construct perturbation signals, and thereby eliminates the need for any information on the target HAR systems and their inputs (i.e., zero-knowledge operation). We evaluate GRAW against seven representative HAR models, using datasets collected in five environments, including our own dataset. We observe that GRAW is the only remote attack scheme that degrades every tested HAR model to a random-selection level. At the same perturbation level, GRAW achieves an attack success ratio up to 76.7% higher than comparison methods, while maintaining over 99% packet success rate on regular Wi-Fi communication. We demonstrate the feasibility of GRAW through real-time, over-the-air experiments with software-defined radios.

cs.NI↗