Wireless Broadband Alliance: Wi-Fi to Play Crucial Role in Private 5G

The Wireless Broadband Alliance yesterday released a report titled 'Private 5G and Wi-Fi Convergence: Key Use Cases and Requirements report'. This paper is the first phase of a multi-step project designed to provide enterprises with a workable blueprint for Wi-Fi and Private 5G adoption and convergence.

The paper highlights the importance of 5G and Wi-Fi convergence in the deployment of seamless, access-agnostic connectivity for enterprise organizations and outlines the critical role new and existing Wi-Fi infrastructure has yet to play in maximizing the potential of 5G, allowing organizations to move to fully converged platforms that offer broad, frictionless coverage and effortless user onboarding.

The report, led by WBA members, Cisco and HPE Aruba Networking, explains that Wi-Fi is already the incumbent network in the majority of enterprises, and that the near-term benefits afforded by 5G depend on an organization’s ability to integrate it with new and existing Wi-Fi capabilities, eventually moving to a fully converged platform that offers enhanced and admin-free user roaming.

According to the report, the integration of Private 5G into enterprise networks requires the reuse of existing infrastructure, rather than the implementation of a separate system for identity management, authentication, and policy and management. The report suggests that Wi-Fi 6E, the latest evolution of Wi-Fi, will offer deterministic capabilities, increased capacity, and faster speeds with decreased latency, making it a critical component for the growing IoT landscape.

The report also mentions that Wi-Fi data accounted for 36% of business internet traffic in the US in 2017 and is expected to rise to over 50% by the end of 2023, highlighting the growing need for reliable Wi-Fi connectivity as businesses expand their number of devices. The arrival of new IoT use cases has also created a need for P5G in enterprise networks, with mobility, reliability, determinism, ultra-low-latency, and security being the key drivers for Wi-Fi adoption.

The report further emphasizes that Wi-Fi, with its latest versions Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, and Wi-Fi 7, will continue to play a significant role in enterprise connectivity, creating new opportunities for businesses, from augmented reality in education to mission-critical applications such as chemical leak detection or water level and flood management. Regulators in various regions, including the US and EU, are also enabling private use of the cellular spectrum, paving the way for 5G adoption.

To ensure successful adoption of 5G, the report recommends convergence with Wi-Fi 6E and other enterprise elements to realize an access-agnostic service layer with improved user experience. Wi-Fi 6E provides advanced, enterprise-grade capabilities on the 6GHz spectrum, such as deterministic quality of service and multi-gigabit throughput, which align perfectly with several 5G service profiles designed for enterprise applications, including factory automation, smart metering, mining, venue hosting, fault management, and surveillance.

The paper goes on to outline four possible deployment models for bringing 5G into enterprise networks, as well as the key considerations for choosing each one, such as the nature of the application, latency in the core and RAN interfaces, and the location and manageability of services. The four models are as follows:

1. On-premises core network and application services - Data sovereignty, site resiliency, and application latency requirements are ensured by keeping all traffic on-prem. Access to conventional enterprise cloud-based applications is enabled, subject to normal limitations around resiliency and latency.
2. On-Premises user plane and application services – The paper outlines several potentially good reasons to move the control plane to the cloud, such as the need for control plane aggregation in a multi-site 5G core network deployment. All other 5G elements and the application services are on-premises, except the 5G control plane elements.
3. Cloud-based core network and application services - User plane traffic from 5G devices will always have to enter the cloud. In such deployment models, it may be possible to move the 5G core network and user plane elements to the cloud where the applications services are located.
4. The hybrid model - There are some application services in the cloud, and some are on-prem. To support such a model, there can be two different Data Network Names (DNN’s), one for supporting applications that are on-premises and another for supporting applications in the cloud.

Phase two of the report will be actioned in Q3 2023 and will move beyond modeling and onto deployment guidelines and trial cases. It will include:

• Architecture considerations
• Extending Wi-Fi fast transition domain to include Private 5G
• Extending singular authentication across Private 5G and Wi-Fi
• Indication of identical service on the other RAT
• IP address preservation and seamless mobility
• Optimized UE paging in a converged Wi-Fi and private 5G networks
• QoS convergence
• Latency analysis and comparison across Wi-Fi and Private 5G, and cryptographically generated device identifiers

The phase one paper, Private 5G and Wi-Fi Convergence – Key Use Cases and Requirements, is available for download on the Wireless Broadband Alliance's website.