App-Based Performance Characterization of Cellular and Wi-Fi Networks in Dense Stadium Deployments

Hardani Ismu Nabil, Muhammad Iqbal Rochman, S. M. Haider Ali Shuvo, Joshua Roy Palathinkal, Monisha Ghosh

The concentration of 77,622 spectators during football games at Notre Dame Stadium creates an exceptionally demanding environment for wireless infrastructure. To handle this extreme user density, the stadium deploys concurrent multi-tier networks serving outdoor users: an enterprise 5/6 GHz Wi-Fi network with ~900 outdoor Access Points (APs) alongside high-density multi-carrier 4G/5G networks powered by a neutral-host small-cell Distributed Antenna System (DAS) with up to 129 unique cell identifiers (PCIs) per operator. This study evaluates user-perceived performance and QoE across these networks using commercial smartphones to execute web browsing, WhatsApp messaging, and Instagram media posting workloads. Our empirical results reveal that while cellular networks deliver strong peak downlink performance in an empty stadium, game-day crowd loads heavily strain uplink and latency performance, triggering a severe cellular "uplink gap." Under Non-Standalone (EN-DC) anchor congestion, web browsing handshakes suffer a catastrophic 5,983 ms P90 Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB), and image upload failure rates climb to 46%. Furthermore, while narrow low-band FDD channels (e.g., n5) maintain robust channel quality during uploads, they exhibit a 70% median Block Error Rate (BLER) during active browsing tests, driving a 36.6% page-load failure rate. Conversely, the dense stadium Wi-Fi infrastructure delivers downlink throughput comparable to the best performing 5G Standalone (SA) deployment while providing better uplink and latency resilience, yielding the lowest game-day page-load failure rate (3.9%) and bounding image upload latency degradation to just 2.1x relative to empty-stadium baselines. These insights proves that densification through localized Wi-Fi deployment is essential to absorb severe stadium traffic spikes.