Enabling Seamless Service Continuity Across Private 5G and WiFi

WiFi has been the wireless technology of choice for business locations and campuses for a while now. Evolving 5G business services are sometimes mistakenly considered as possible alternatives to WiFi, while, in fact, they are complementary network technologies, and their coexistence enables the introduction of new use cases in business campuses. Such use cases require seamless outdoor-indoor mobility and deterministic low-latency access to campus-cloud-hosted applications. One example is Automated Guided Vehicles, or AGVs, that carry materials and objects around industrial facilities, while their controller is hosted in the campus’ local cloud. AGVs are dependent on continuous low latency and reliable connectivity to the campus cloud while moving around,
indoors and outdoors.

RAD’s 5G/WiFi Convergence solution enables seamless service continuity across multiple links by intelligently splitting and switching traffic across links.

RAD’s solution enables ATSSS*-like functionality and is comprised of a 5G/WiFi CPE and a virtualized ATSSS Hub. This is currently an over-the-top solution that is not reliant on 5G core support for ATSSS, nor on WiFi access to the 5G core. The demo showcases a video that is
uninterruptedly uploaded to the cloud across 5G and WiFi links, during changing networking conditions. This video simulates the video output that is generated by a mobile IoT device (e.g., an AGV) and sent to the edge cloud for real-time processing.

The demo shows uninterrupted video upload while the network behaves as follows:

• Traffic split between WiFi and 5G
• Traffic switchover to 5G due to WiFi cut-off
• Traffic switchback to multi-path WiFi and 5G

* ATSSS: Access Traffic Steering, Switching & Splitting, a 3GPP standardized architecture that enables multiple simultaneous active paths.