Roaming Performance Analysis and Comparison between Wi-Fi and Private Cellular Network

Abstract

Private network deployment is gaining momentum in warehouses, retail, automation, health care, and many such use cases to guarantee mission-critical services with less latency. Guaranteeing the delay-sensitive application in Wi-Fi is always challenging due to the nature of unlicensed spectrum. As the device ecosystem keeps growing and expanding, all the current and future devices can support both Wi-Fi and Private Cellular Network (CBRS is the primary spectrum in the US for private network deployment). However, due to the existing infrastructure and huge investment in the dense Wi-Fi network, consumers prefer two deployment models. The first scenario is deploying the private network outdoors and using the existing Wi-Fi indoors. The second scenario is to use the existing Wi-Fi network as a backup for offloading the traffic indoors and parallely utilizes the private network deployment for less latency applications. Hence, we expect, in both scenarios, a roaming between two technologies \emph{i.e.,} Wi-Fi and Private Cellular Network. In this work, we would like to quantify the roaming performance or service interruption time when the device moves from Wi-Fi to Private Network (CBRS) and vice-versa.