Indoor Sharing in the Mid-Band: A Performance Study of Neutral-Host, Cellular Macro, and Wi-Fi

Abstract

Indoor environments present a significant challenge for wireless connectivity, as immense data demand strains traditional solutions. Public Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), utilizing outdoor macro base stations (BSs), suffer from poor signal penetration. Indoor Wi-Fi networks, on the other hand, may face reliability issues due to spectrum contention. Shared spectrum models, particularly the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) utilized by private 4G/5G networks, have emerged as a promising alternative to provide reliable indoor service. Moreover, these private networks are equipped with the neutral-host (NH) model, seamlessly offloading indoor MNOs' traffic to the private CBRS network. This paper presents a comprehensive, in-situ performance evaluation of three co-located technologies utilizing mid-bands spectrum (1-6 GHz)--a CBRS-based NH network, public MNO macro networks, and a Wi-Fi 6 network--within a large, big-box retail store characterized by significant building loss. Our analysis demonstrates: (i) the NH network provides superior indoor coverage compared to MNO macro, requiring only six CBRS devices (CBSDs)--versus 65 Access Points (APs) for enterprise Wi-Fi--to achieve full coverage, with a median building loss of 26.6 dB ensuring interference-free coexistence with outdoor federal incumbents; (ii) the NH network achieves substantial indoor throughput gains, with per-channel normalized throughput improvements of 1.44x and 1.62x in downlink (DL), and 4.33x and 13x in uplink (UL), compared to 4G and 5G macro deployments, respectively; (iii) the NH deployment achieves a median indoor aggregated physical (PHY)-layer DL throughput gain of 2.08x over 5G macro deployments indoors, despite utilizing only 40 MHz of aggregated bandwidth compared to 225 MHz for 5G macro; and (iv) the NH deployment also outperforms Wi-Fi in application-layer HTTP DL performance by 5.05x.