Lumos5G: Mapping and Predicting Commercial mmWave 5G Throughput [conference paper]

The emerging 5G services offer numerous new opportunities for networked applications. In this study, we seek to answer two key questions: i) is the throughput of mmWave 5G predictable, and ii) can we build "good" machine learning models for 5G throughput prediction? To this end, we conduct a measurement study of commercial mmWave 5G services in a major U.S. city, focusing on the throughput as perceived by applications running on user equipment (UE). Through extensive experiments and statistical analysis, we identify key UE-side factors that affect 5G performance and quantify to what extent the 5G throughput can be predicted. We then propose Lumos5G - a composable machine learning (ML) framework that judiciously considers features and their combinations, and apply state-of-the-art ML techniques for making context-aware 5G throughput predictions. We demonstrate that our framework is able to achieve 1.37x to 4.84x reduction in prediction error compared to existing models. Our work can be viewed as a feasibility study for building what we envisage as a dynamic 5G throughput map (akin to Google traffic map). We believe this approach provides opportunities and challenges in building future 5G-aware apps.