[Bloat] Does 5g have the bloat problems of WiFi?

[Kirn Gill]

Replying to Dave Taht,

There's a few considerations here:

 - What is "5G"?

Strictly speaking, 5G is ITU-T's IMT-2020 standard(s). So far, there
is only one system under this standard, 3GPP's New Radio (NR). NR is
what is meant as 5G in layspeak.

The NR air interface is defined in 3GPP TS 38.xxx series documents.

Against point 2, about operators simply wanting more active SIMs to
charge for, it's worth noting that NR can be deployed for private
operation; the company that's using the service could itself own the
entire network it's using. There are companies using private LTE
networks for V2x and remote sensing, see for example:
https://steelguru.com/mining/l/532247, or contract a third party to
build a dedicated network:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/telstra-deploys-private-lte-network-in-png-volcanic-crater-gold-mine/

NR operates over commercial and unlicensed frequency bands. The
specific frequency bands defined for the system are listed in 3GPP TS
38.104 (Rel. 15) section 5.2

802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad use CSMA/CA - Carrier Sense Multiple Access with
Collison Avoidance - as their multiple access scheme, same as 802.3.
Each transmitter completely owns the medium when transmitting.

802.11ax, LTE, and NR use OFDMA - Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiple Access - as their multiple access scheme. Instead of the
transmitter having the full channel for the duration it is
transmitting, OFDMA takes OFDM modulation and divides not only across
timeslots/timed transmission frames, but also by subdividing the full
channel into simpler "resource blocks" with a fixed number of OFDM
tones.

LTE and NR have many features that Wi-Fi lacks which results in a far
superior user experience. OFDMA, only recently adopted for 802.11ax
("Wi-Fi 6"), generally results in far superior throughput rates than
CSMA/CA when many users are involved. In LTE and NR, this is also
optimized further with centralized (at the eNB/gNB) MAC scheduling for
all traffic on both uplink and downlink.

Inter-cell handover in all cellular systems is much better than in
Wi-Fi; Wi-Fi is a mobile-only system where the mobile station is in
full control of the process, and it's a "break before make", that is,
the mobile station fully disassociates from the first access point
before associating with the next access point, even in the case of a
shared BSSID and background Ethernet network. It's like unplugging
from one Ethernet port and plugging into another one rather quickly,
complete with the brief hiccup in network applications.

Cellular is a lot better; the mobile station scans for neighboring
cells to the one it's connected to in it's spare time, and sends this
list to the network, so that the base station can "see" the different
signal strength's from the mobile station's perspective. The network
then instructs the mobile station to make a blind jump to whichever
cell it feels will best serve the mobile station and reduce power
consumption on that end. "Association" is with the network itself, not
with individual base stations, so there's no need to do the "break
before make" dance of Wi-Fi.

--
Kirn Gill II
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