A New Approach for Measuring Delay in 5G Cellular Networks

5G networks have introduced new technologies and paradigms to support new use cases with very demanding quality of service (QoS) requirements, in terms of metrics such as delay or reliability. Accordingly, operators need new tools to measure these metrics in different realistic, often extreme, conditions, so that they can evaluate the degree of fulfilment of their service levels. In this work we propose a simple practical framework to evaluate the delay between two nodes in such a cellular network. This framework allows evaluating the delay in the uplink and downlink channels independently. We have validated the proposed framework on top of a real 5G network, by measuring the delay as a function of the requested data rates of the network in different network slices.