YouTube goes 5G: Benchmarking YouTube in 4G vs 5G

Fifth Generation 5G cellular network users are increasing exponentially, where 5G coverage is a challenge for global telecommunications to provide end-users with maximum Quality of Experience (QoE). 5G technology New Radio (NR) is developed  to address high bandwidth, low latency and massive connectivity requirements of enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) compared to Fourth Generation (4G) Long-Term Evolution (LTE). In order to provide a 5G network while addressing compatibility with previous cellular systems, there are two 5G deployment options, Non-Standalone (NSA) and Standalone (SA).  In NSA, 5G control plane relies on a pre-existing 4G core network while SA on a dedicated 5G core network. As 5G technology evolves, its performance is expected to improve over time. Therefore, the QoE of YouTube video streaming from  Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) perspective is ideal and challenging compared to 4G/LTE networks. Evaluating mobile carriers’ end-to-end network performance in the wild is known to be difficult and complicated. Therefore, we carry out a massive 4G and 5G dataset collection campaign using commercial 4G and 5G networks, where we consider YouTube as a baseline for video streaming to collect Channel Level Metrics (CLM) and YouTube Quality of Experience (QoE) logs with 1-second granularity.