On studying active radio measurements estimating the mobile network quality of service for the Regulatory Authority's purposes

The Regulatory Authority monitors and regulates the telecom market at a national-wide range. One of its main tasks is to put spectrum at the disposal of the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) for serving the increasing number of users and services. Another task of the Regulator is to demand a minimum quality of service to the network infrastructure. For this scope, the Regulator needs to have an independent estimation of the quality of service of the mobile network. This paper presents a methodology for Regulator-triggered monitoring of 5G radio resources and estimation of the maximum throughput offered to the end users. The requirements of the methodology are: (1) monitoring measurements must be external to the network, (2) all information needed for Quality of Service (QoS) estimation may be obtained only through active measurements in the network, and (3) the number of measurements should be as low as possible (for cost-saving) while offering statistical significance. The presented spot measurements validate the methodology and show the boundary use cases where the methodology would overestimate the transmission quality.