A report from the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) outlines the growing convergence of private 5G and wifi, including architectural strategies and technical options for seamless interworking between the two technologies.

This phase-two report builds on the phase-one report, which highlighted key use cases and the crucial role wifi infrastructure plays in optimising 5G performance. The new report presents architectural strategies and technical options for seamless interworking between the two technologies.

Since 2017, the WBA has led efforts to demonstrate the benefits of converged licensed and unlicensed wireless technologies, focusing on integrating 5G and wifi. While private 5G and wifi have aligned technically and complement each other, their distinct characteristics make them suitable for different use cases and market needs. Technological advances such as WBA OpenRoaming and enhanced quality of service in wifi have further bridged performance gaps, allowing for coexistence that reduces operational costs, simplifies management and improves user experience across diverse environments.

This report outlines the next phase of integration, including architectural considerations, providing a roadmap for enterprises seeking to leverage both networks to increase performance, efficiency and cost savings. This convergence will allow enterprises to use the high-speed, low-latency benefits of 5G alongside the broad coverage and flexibility offered by wifi, tailored to different use cases and industry demands.

Notable proposals include using Radius-based AAA infrastructure for 5G device authentication, enabling network operators to unify identity management and policy enforcement across both wifi and private 5G. This integration allows for a singular policy to be enforced on all sessions from a given device, whether connected via wifi or 5G, simplifying network management and improving user experience. The report includes contributions from tech companies such as Broadcom, Cisco, Nokia, Aruba, Boldyn Networks and Intel.

Additional proposals include a standardised approach for bootstrapping keys on wifi access based on the key material generated from the 5G access authentication. This helps reduce the number of messages exchanged during the initial attach. Proposed is a method and technique for leveraging session keys generated in 3GPP access (5G/LTE) and leveraging the 802.11r capability of wifi infrastructure to derive the fast-roaming keys, as the user moves from private 3GPP to wifi access. This approach results in a reduction of connection establishment time to wifi access.

It is proposed that the network maintain a mapping of service name and network identifier in one access, with the corresponding identifiers in the other access. Both the wifi and private 5G access networks will have awareness of these service mappings.

And it suggests enabling a multi-access capable piece of user equipment (UE) to attach to both wifi and private 5G access networks and have distinct IP address configuration on an access basis. Application-binding to the access is based on the UE policy.

The report explores several other technical options, such as service functions, which are extensively deployed in most networks providing features such as security, WAN acceleration and server load balancing. It also covers how a device connectivity status can be shared across networks for optimisations, and how latency can be improved by moving user place traffic in wifi and private 5G access networks.

“The convergence and coexistence of wifi and private 5G play an important role in shaping the future of wireless networking,” said Tiago Rodrigues, WBA CEO. “It will not only help establish the standards needed to ensure its technical success for operators, network owners, enterprises and users, but provide clear advice on the architectural considerations for such converged implementations. In many environments, the coexistence of wifi and private 5G is essential, and there is significant value in realising synergies between these two technologies to increase competitiveness and reduce operational costs by the elimination of redundant functions, simplifying management, and greatly improving end-user experiences.”

A new phase will begin this year, focused on developing industry standards, including roaming, access traffic steering and quality of experience metrics. This convergence strategy should set benchmarks for network interoperability, security and user-centric services, enabling enterprises to harness the strengths of both 5G’s speed and reliability and wifi’s coverage and flexibility.

“Wifi meets the demands of most enterprise customers,” said Matt MacPherson, wireless CTO at Cisco (www.cisco.com). “However, the convergence of wifi and private 5G elevates capabilities by offering policy-based segmentation aligned with business needs. By combining wifi and private 5G with a unified policy, enterprises gain control. Cisco is excited to collaborate on this pioneering report, which provides the architectural and technical guidance enterprises need to leverage the combined strengths of both networks.”

The phase one report can be found at wballiance.com/resource/private-5g-and-wi-fi-convergence-key-use-cases-and-requirements and the phase-two report at wballiance.com/private-5g-and-wi-fi-convergence-phase-2.