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arXiv · 2511.16751

Performance Comparison of 5G NR Uplink MIMO and Uplink Carrier Aggregations on Commercial Network

Henry Shao·Kasidis Arunruangsirilert
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Abstract

Demands for uplink on mobile networks are increasing with the rapid development of social media platforms, 4K/8K content creation, IoT applications, and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband. As a result, Uplink MIMO (UL-MIMO) and Uplink Carrier Aggregation (UL-CA) have been widely deployed for the first time on commercial 5G networks. UL-MIMO enables the transmission of two data streams on one frequency band in strong RF conditions, theoretically doubling throughput and efficiency. On the other hand, UL-CA allows for simultaneous upload on greater channel widths, allowing more resources to be assigned to a single UE for higher throughput. In the United States, T-Mobile USA, a mobile network operator (MNO), has deployed network-wide 5G Standalone (SA), along with UL-MIMO on Time Division Duplex (TDD) band n41 and UL-CA between TDD and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) NR bands. In this paper, the uplink throughput performance of UL-MIMO and UL-CA will be evaluated on the commercial T-Mobile 5G network on a variety of RF environments and modes of transportation. It was found that, even with the efficiency gains, UL-MIMO yields slower uplink throughput in most scenarios. However, in stronger RF conditions, UL-MIMO can provide an adequate user experience, so capacity can be conserved by reserving UL-CA for UE in weaker RF conditions.

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Henry Shao, Kasidis Arunruangsirilert. 2025-11-20. Performance Comparison of 5G NR Uplink MIMO and Uplink Carrier Aggregations on Commercial Network. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16751

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