Outdoor private 4G performance data

Testing CBRS based 4G with indoor and outdoor CPEs

Team Celona avatar
Written by Team Celona
Updated over a week ago

So far, real-world data on how CBRS based private 4G performs has been quite scarce. In this document, we will share data from one of our recently completed field trials of Celona Outdoor APs. Client devices under test were indoor and outdoor CPE gateways and routers.

In the deployment below, Celona Outdoor AP mounted at 12m height and installed with dual 90 degree 16.7dBi sectorized antennas.

CBRS based LTE Wireless Coverage Map for a single Celona Outdoor AP

Test 1: Single Outdoor CPE connected to 1 sector at 450m

This test location is on the 0 degrees, left-hand edge of the sector coverage area as shown by the green icon in the image below.

You can see from the path profile that we are non-line-of-sight, with a 3 story building directly in the signal path at approximated 300m. There are also a number of trees in full leaf in between the CPE devices and the Celona outdoor AP.

Throughput testing was done with iPerf 3 UDP traffic from a laptop connected to the CPE client device. Test duration was configured as 30 seconds.

Client Device

Average RSRP (dbm)

Download (Mbps)

Upload (Mbps)

Outdoor CPE

-104

45

15

Indoor CPE

-111

35

1

Test 2: Single Outdoor CPE connected to 1 sector at 700m range

This test location is on the 90 degrees, left-hand edge of the sector coverage area as shown by the green icon in the image below.

The path profile shows that we were non-line-of-sight at this test location with a number of trees and buildings between the outdoor CPE and the outdoor AP.

Throughput results were as follows:

Client Device

Average RSRP (dbm)

Download (Mbps)

Upload (Mbps)

Outdoor CPE

-116

20

4

Test 3: Multiple CPE connected to 1 Sector at 450m range

This test was performed at the same physical location as Test 1 but with 12 devices concurrently running iPerf3 UDP analysis, for a duration of 5 minutes. The orientation and height of each outdoor CPE were adjusted to create a range of different RSRP and signal strength values, in order to simulate different connection profiles.

High density testing for Celona outdoor AP

In addition to 5x outdoor CPE and 1x indoor CPE devices with throughput metrics shown below, there were 6x Google Pixel smartphones connected to the same outdoor AP at a much closer distance.

Three of these smartphones were configured with 20Mbps target download bitrate and the remaining three were configured with a 5Mbps target upload bitrate in order to simulate an environment where the radio interface is saturated during the tests.

Client Device

Average RSRP (dBm)

iPerf test result (Mbps)

Outdoor CPE 1

-89

Download: 7.8

Outdoor CPE 2

-95

Download: 7.8

Outdoor CPE 3

-93

Upload: 1.6

Outdoor CPE 4

-92

Upload: 1.6

Outdoor CPE 5

-90

Upload: 1.6

Indoor CPE

-108

Download: 4.4

All devices were in the default group which uses a round-robin traffic schedule. You can see from the results above that the network maintained a stable distribution of available bandwidth to simultaneous users.

Test 4: Total Sector Throughput

In addition to gathering data for client device performance at range, we also measured the total available throughput for each of the two sectors on the outdoor AP, with TDD Config 1 profile on the Celona AP:

  • Download: 50Mbps

  • Upload: 20Mbps

Summary

Prior to running field tests, our engineering team calculated the predicted throughput for a range of signal strength values - and the results of the physical tests were very much in line with predictions. If you would like to discuss these test results in more detail you can schedule a custom demo with us here.

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