5 GHz Wi-Fi Coexistence With 5G Cellular For Improved User Experience

By Jin Cho, Tanuj Khurana, Justin Lee, and Anand Raghavan

The ever-increasing demand for higher data rates and reduced buffering times has driven the continuous evolution of cellular communication and transmission. 5G promises to take performance to levels never seen before, with mounting pressure to deploy 5G handsets faster than any previous cellular standard. With this urgency to release 5G smartphones, potential Wi-Fi coexistence issues have largely been ignored, despite the fact that Wi-Fi and 5G cellular are complementary technologies and effective coexistence of the two technologies would greatly enhance the end user experience. In fact, Wi-Fi data usage can reach as high as 92% of total smartphone data usage according to various analytics reports.1,2 Further, the 5 GHz Wi-Fi channel (802.11a/n/ac/ax) is being widely implemented in user equipment (UE) across the world, offering additional range beyond the traditional 2.4 GHz spectrum. Combined with the high speeds available in 5G, the efficient utilization of both Wi-Fi and 5G spectrums has the potential to offer substantially increased data rates with negligible latency. Therefore, it is important that Wi-Fi remain an integral part of smartphones and complement 5G in order to provide the optimal user experience.