Análise comparativa da cobertura e da qualidade de enlace das redes móveis 4G LTE e 5G NR no campus da UFJF em Juiz de Fora: estudo de caso

Abstract

This work presents a case study on the analysis of the coverage and radio link quality of Fourth-Generation Long-Term Evolution (4G LTE) and Fifth-Generation New Radio (5G NR) mobile networks on the campus of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, in the city of Juiz de Fora, considering indoor and outdoor environments. The evaluation was conducted through a measurement campaign using a mobile network scanner, enabling identification of operators, frequency bands, carriers, and physical-layer metrics associated with the evaluated technologies. The collected data were analyzed using empirical cumulative distribution functions, applied to the values of the reference signal received power (RSRP), and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) metrics, in addition to the spectral efficiency estimated from the measured SINR values. The results show that indoor environments exhibit significant degradation in cov- erage and link quality, particularly due to building penetration losses, indoor obstructions, multipath propagation, and interfering signals. In 4G LTE mobile networks, a strong de- pendence of performance on the frequency band and operator was observed, with some bands presenting spectral efficiency values below the adopted reference criteria. In 5G NR mobile networks, operation in the n78 band showed remarkable performance outdoors but remained more limited indoors. Overall, the results show that coverage and radio link quality on the UFJF campus exhibit heterogeneous behavior, with better performance outdoors and more pronounced limitations indoors.