Implications of handover events in commercial 5G non-standalone deployments in Rome

Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks are gaining popularity and are soon expected to become the norm in the global telecommunications industry. In this paper, we follow an experimental approach to study key aspects of Handover (HO) events in commercial 5G Non Standalone (NSA) deployments. We collect our dataset by conducting a large-scale measurement campaign in the city of Rome, Italy. With our analysis, we aim to first, empirically evaluate the current HO strategies followed in 5G NSA, and second, to show the impact of HOs on end-user application performance. Our results show an increased number of intra-RAT HOs, i.e., HOs between cells with the same Radio Access Technology (RAT), in situation where signal quality conditions between multiple candidate cells is on par. In addition, we show that inter-RAT HOs, i.e., HOs between cells with different RATs, can be detrimental to the application performance.