June has been a very exciting month in the 5G world. Not only did we see the approval of a package of new projects that will expand 5G NR, in Release 16 and beyond, to new industries, but 3GPP also marked the completion of the 5G NR specifications for standalone (SA) mode. This milestone complements the non-standalone (NSA) specifications completed in December last year, and is significant, as it represents the final run towards 5G commercialization in 2019.

The SA specifications — in addition to supporting independent deployment of 5G NR with the new 5G core network — aim to enable new end-to-end network features, from network slicing to more granular Quality of Service (QoS) support. These network features are essential for enabling new business models.

With the SA deployment option for 5G NR, operators, mobile device manufacturers, and app developers are eager to get answers to a new set of questions:

How will 5G NR SA mobile broadband perform in the real world?

How do user experiences differ from 5G NR NSA mode?

How does SA benefit the capacity for both 5G NR and LTE TDD networks?

Today, we are showcasing the next release of our 5G NR Network Capacity and User Experience Simulation in the Qualcomm booth at Mobile World Congress Shanghai. The simulation study conducted in Tokyo builds on top of the original platform that was released just four months ago, and it helps to answer these questions and deliver quantitative insights to the expected real-world performance and user experiences of 5G and Gigabit LTE devices, operating in the new SA deployment mode.

Let’s take a closer look at the results:

Tokyo 5G NR sub-6 GHz — downlink simulation

Unlike our simulations for Frankfurt and San Francisco, Tokyo modeled a SA 5G NR network (Figure 1, below) using 20 existing macro cell base stations with the new 5G NR cell sites co-located with existing LTE cell sites. The Tokyo 5G NR network operates on 100 MHz of 3.5 GHz spectrum, with an underlying Gigabit LTE TDD network operating across three LTE spectrum bands (3x20MHz). The propagation between the base stations and the devices was modeled based on high-definition 3D maps of Tokyo to account for path loss, shadowing, diffraction, building penetration loss, interference, and more.

In addition, RF capabilities were modeled to accurately depict real-world performance, such as massive MIMO capability for 5G NR with 256 antenna elements and 4x4 MIMO on LTE TDD.

We applied diverse traffic models that simulates popular users experiences — browsing, downloading, and streaming — to a mixture of devices with different capabilities.