An Empirical Study of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and Multi-Connectivity Scalability in an Indoor Industrial Scenario

Industry 4.0 is being adopted by the manufacturing sector to improve the flexibility and reduce installation costs by the use of wireless connectivity. There is an open question of which wireless technology deployment should be used in the factory to fulfil the requirements for next-generation applications such as autonomous mobile robots. Wi-Fi technology is the most extended and easy to deploy, while the fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) has been designed to support these industrial needs. Therefore, it is important to compare both technologies from a performance point of view, especially under different load conditions and number of devices. The use of multi-connectivity between 5G and Wi-Fi can also be an option to fulfil the requirements for the most critical real-time applications. In this paper, we empirically measure the scalability of 5G, Wi-Fi and multi-connectivity in the “Aalborg University 5G Smart Production Lab” and compare them in terms of latency and packet loss with different packet sizes. We found that in general Wi-Fi obtains lower latencies but large tails in the distribution, with a higher packet loss compared to 5G. On the other hand, 5G latency is very consistent with bounded tails, and low packet loss is obtained. In terms of scalability, 5G scales better than Wi-Fi, the latter being very affected by the number of devices transmitting data. Finally, multi-connectivity showed an improved reliability and lower latencies in all evaluated cases.