Empirical study on 5G NR Adjacent Channel Coexistence

5G New Radio (NR) non-public network deployments for industrial and enterprise applications are becoming highly popular in locally licensed and/or operator spectrum. The interference from coexisting networks on adjacent channels (in same or adjacent spectrum bands) could potentially deteriorate the performance characteristics in certain deployment scenarios. Appropriate interference mitigation is thus required to achieve the desired performance levels. In this paper, we present our detailed empirical results on the performance impact of coexisting 5G NR networks operating on adjacent channels. Our experimental study conducted on an industrial shopfloor reports the impact on the downlink and uplink latency and throughput when using the same and different Time Division Duplexing patterns for coexisting networks. Our empirical evaluation includes realistic user equipment deployment locations and traffic load conditions. We also present our results on different mitigation techniques to counter the adjacent channel interference effects.