A Comparative Measurement Study of Commercial WLAN and 5G LAN Systems

In this study, we present the first measurement study of commercial IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi wireless local-area network (WLAN) and 3GPP 5G LAN (i.e., CBRS) networks in terms of latency, packet drop, and throughput. As the number of downlink and uplink traffic increases in the WLAN network, we observed significant number of packet drops and increased latency on the delay sensitive traffic, especially in mobility test cases where mobile devices roam from one Access Point (AP) to another AP. On the other hand, in both static and mobility test cases, packet drop rate of 5G LAN is consistently low at the desired target level due to interference free spectrum channel and efficient allocation of radio resources at MAC scheduling. Also, in the 5G LAN network, the Celona Micro-slicing feature guarantees minimum latency in a consistent manner across different test conditions. During the capacity experiments, we observed that, as the load increases, 5G LAN is able to guarantee fair allocation of radio resource among the connected users compared to WLAN system. In the end, we ran test with realistic enterprise use-case applications such as Zoom, Bar-code scanning, VOIP, and Camera to observe and analyze the user experience in WLAN and 5G LAN systems.