Empirical evaluation of 5G and Wi-Fi mesh interworking for integrated access and backhaul networking paradigm

The Fifth Generation (5G) of mobile networks and beyond have emerged with ambitions to facilitate the deployment and evolution of a wide spectrum of applications such as Industry 4.0 and 5.0 use cases. Despite this trend of increasing importance to upgrade the networked applications to the next generation, the use of 5G and beyond technologies can be a prohibitive barrier for some business sectors due to the high deployment costs that it can incur. To overcome this obstacle, more cost-effective approaches in networking are entailed. In this work, an innovative approach coupling 5G and Wi-Fi mesh networking is proposed and developed as a promising solution to extend 5G services to the indoor use case scenarios whilst being capable of keeping the capital expenditure of the network infrastructure significantly lower. In order to empirically validate and evaluate this new networking paradigm, a number of experiments have been performed over a testbed with a demanding video application as a representative use case. The experimental results prove the gained benefits from this new approach, especially, video users can be more than twice as far away without compromising the quality of the video consumption experience. Specifically, the results show that users can be 29% further away using a single router, and 100% further away if a second router is added.