Warehouse Deployment: A Comparative Measurement Study of Commercial Wi-Fi and CBRS Systems

In this paper, we analyze the latency, packet drop, and throughput performance of the commercial Wi-Fi and CBRS systems in a dense warehouse deployment. This paper is the first real-time warehouse measurement comparison of the mission-critical application with commercial Wi-Fi and CBRS deployments. The downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) data are transmitted via Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) in the network. The results collected from the realistic implementation demonstrate that as the UL/DL traffic increases in the Wi-Fi network, instability in the system, a significant number of packet drops, and increased latency on the delay-sensitive traffic exist. It is more severe especially in mobility test cases where mobile devices roam from one Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) to another AP. On the other hand, in both static and mobility test cases, the packet drop rate of CBRS is consistently low at the desired target level with TDD frame allocation at Medium Access Control (MAC) scheduling. Also, the Celona Micro-slicing feature in the CBRS network consistently guarantees lower latency across different test conditions.