Performance Evaluation of 5G/WiFi-6 Coexistence

Abstract

The fifth-generation mobile communication network (5G) is the promising technology nowadays to provide not only a higher speed compared to 4G but also a revolution of services to cover different industrial sectors such as health, production, energy, and many. WiFi-6 is a new wireless local area network (WLAN) technology that is suitable to work in an office, home, and dense areas. As a new technology, 5G has some limitations concerning coverage and capacity. To overcome these limitations, one possible solution is to use the free unlicensed spectrum available in Wi-Fi technology, therefore, a complement solution of 5G/WiFi-6 coexistence is proposed to make both technologies complement each other in providing a better quality of service for the end-user concerning a higher speed, low latency, and higher capacity. According to OFDM modulation, the proposed model divides the cell into two virtual zones, the inner zone represents WiFi-6 technology surrounded by 5G technology. All resources will be shared between the two technologies taken into consideration that more bandwidth should be given to the most inner zone with high intensity of traffic. The call admission control algorithm will be based on a minimum bit rate to be given to each zone that should be satisfied to admit the call. The model is solved using MOSEL-2 simulation language, to study different performance parameters such as BER, utilization, blocking probability, latency, throughput, and aggregate average bit rate in both zones. The simulation results show that coexistence causes some degradation in 5G performance, however, a positive effect on the overall cell performance is achieved by balancing the load all over the whole cell.