Received 11 September 2023, accepted 24 October 2023, date of publication 6 November 2023, date of current version 16 November 2023. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3330646 5G Performance Measurements in Mobility for the Bus Transportation System in an Urban Environment NEREA FERNÁNDEZ-BERRUETA , SANTIAGO FIGUEROA-LORENZO , PAUL BUSTAMANTE , SAIOA ARRIZABALAGA , AND IGONE VELEZ CEIT-Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA), 20018 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universidad de Navarra, 20018 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain Corresponding author: Nerea Fernández-Berrueta (nfernandez@ceit.es) This work was supported by the 5G Euskadi funded by Red.es through Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital, Gobierno de España, under Grant 2019/C012/00076139. ABSTRACT 5G is a new technology that can provide more services, due to the improvement in performance, than the current mobile technologies. Because of that, it is selected as a possible technology for automotive transportation systems. Nevertheless, nowadays the 5G technology is in the deployment phase, which could present bugs requiring improvements in the network. Therefore, a tool capable of measuring some of the most relevant features of the 5G, as some of the requirements for the transportation system, is presented. The measurements with the specified tool were carried out in a specific line from the bus company in the San Sebastián city center with the aim of finding out the services that could be improved. Afterward, the results from the different measurements are shown, compared, and discussed. Finally, some conclusions about the obtained results and the services to use the target technology are presented. INDEX TERMS 5G, performance, road, testing, wireless communication technology. I. INTRODUCTION Wireless communication technologies have evolved in the last years, especially cellular technologies. One of the last cellular technologies already tested and deployed is LTE. This technology is the best of the cellular in terms of performance and the most broadly deployed in terms of coverage. Never- theless, another technology related to Public Mobiles Land Networks (PLMNs) emerged in the last years, 5G. It is expected that 5G will accelerate economic growth and make a hyper-connected society possible, in which all people are connected to the network whenever needed, as well as a wide variety of devices and objects that are virtually connected to the network. Thus, the 5G network will enable new use cases such as smart cities, smart agriculture, logis- tics, and public safety agencies [1]. These improvements can be reached thanks to the better expected performance of The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Paulo Mendes . 5G compared to LTE, making possible new applications and services. Focusing on the specific knowledge of vehicular commu- nications, nowadays the main current technologies envisaged are IEEE802.11p (short-range technology) and LTE (cellular technology), although they have some limitations. On the one hand, IEEE 802.11p provides a low communication range, and its throughput and delay performance degrade quickly as the network load increases. On the other hand, in LTE, the latency rises with higher numbers of users in the cell; every data packet (e.g., between two nearby vehicles) must traverse the infrastructure, and the coverage of the cellular technology would determine its availability [2]. Although LTE being as the most deployed technology, it does not provide the performance enough for certain appli- cations such as remote driving. Covering this issue, the 5G is emerging as a new technology with advantageous features. Then, the focus of this paper is on this new technology and its benefits, which could bring new services and applications to 127132  2023 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ VOLUME 11, 2023