# Performance of the 5 th Generation Indoor Wireless Technologies-Empirical Study
## 4 Discussion and Future Work  
The results gathered from the extensive test sets indicate that the state-of-the-art Wi-Fi 6 technology offers good enough performance and can even outperform the 5G NR in an indoor environment in terms of throughput and latency when distance and coverage do not increase enormously. Fifth-generation and beyond cellular networking seems to be more suitable for wide-area communications with extensive coverage and reliability alongside sufficient data rates and low latency. The usage of current Wi-Fi technologies allows especially improved uplink performance with low latency, which is critical for certain use cases and applications. Such use cases range, for example, from industrial automation to eHealth, which usually have either dedicated constant network environment. With upcoming 5G slicing technology, 5G radio access can be shared with public and private networks; in any case, it needs to be noted that Wi-Fi is also a good alternative technology for private network implementations, especially for the small scale networks. Because industrial factory sites can have multiple network connectivity needs ranging from visitors to automated robots, the slicing feature is needed to enable appropriate prioritized QoS management regardless of whether 5G or Wi-Fi is used.  
The gained results from our experiments provide valuable information for designing, developing, and implementing the requirements for the next-generation wireless applications. Average delay under 5 ms enable basically real-time networking for remote operations and control and very low latency acts as an enabler for the safety-critical industrial applications [37]. Thus, the application delay can become the bottleneck for such use cases and should be therefore carefully designed and implemented according to the use case. Based on the results, there is no clear winner for the used technology, and both technologies have a road-map for future versions and are likely to coexist for a long time. The real choice between the Wi-Fi and 5G technology depends a lot on the use case, business models, and available frequency. The tests were run in a test network that has limited bandwidth available in the cellular frequencies, and the throughput performance between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 would be more comparable if the frequency bands available for the cellular operators could have been fully utilized in the tests. Authors will continue the evaluations studies as the technologies evolve, and the next step is to evaluate the radio technologies with higher frequencies above 24 GHz.  
The authors of this article worked as a team, and all had a significant contribution to the work performed, including the following: Conceptualization, J.M. and M.U.; methodology, I.H.; building the test setup and performing the actual test campaigns, M.H. and S.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research has been funded and supported by VTT-Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. 5G and beyond test network has been supported also by Business Finland and Academy of Finland.  
Not applicable.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.