Battery Life: Performance Analysis and Comparison between Wi-Fi, CBRS, and Macro Deployment System

In this study, we analyze the performance of the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi Wireless Local-area Network (WLAN), 3GPP 5G LAN (i.e., CBRS), and 3GPP Macro networks in terms of battery efficiency. For the delay-sensitive application running on Wi-Fi, we observed a significant increase in the battery drain. This is mainly due to contention on the unlicensed spectrum medium for packet transmission. On the other hand, devices running on 5G LAN solved consistently low battery drain due to interference-free spectrum channel and efficient allocation of radio resources at MAC scheduling. In addition, in the 5G LAN network, the Celona MicroSlicing feature guarantees precise resource allocation for delay-sensitive applications. In the end, comparing the Macro network, where the base station is at a far distance; the UE or client needs to transmit at high power, which eventually draining battery significantly compared to the CBRS system.