On the Use of Existing 4G Small Cell Deployments for 5G V2N Communication

We study the feasibility of the dense 4G and 5G cellular networks at sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave carriers for vehicle-to-network applications. For this purpose, road-side network coverage, signal-to-interference-plus-noise (SINR) and handover rate are used as key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs are calculated over realistic vehicular user routes which are created by Google Maps APIs. The channel pathloss is simulated using a ray tracing software and it is shown that even for a dense 4G small cell deployment the coverage at 28 GHz carrier frequency is very fragmented and thus, service continuity depends on the availability of sub-mmWave carriers.