On the Performance Evaluation of UGV over Cellular Networks

5-th generation of mobile networks (5G) speeds up the data rate, serves more users, and improves the support for machine-to-machine communication. This paper investigates the impact of different communication technologies on the performance of UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicle). Specifically, we study the UGV energy consumption and decision time when it replaces the previous generation of cellular networks with 5G. Then, we propose a new test bed to extensively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art communication technologies as well as 5G using several lab tests. Our extensive experiments, employing the proposed setting, show while using 3G takes more than 6 seconds to make a decision, using 5G, instead, decreases the decision time to less than 0.5 seconds.