CBL - Campus del Baix Llobregat

Projecte llegit

Títol: Study of the deployment status of Wi-Fi and cellular technology

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: LÓPEZ AGUILERA, ELENA

Departament: ENTEL

Títol: Study of the deployment status of Wi-Fi and cellular technology

Data inici oferta: 29-01-2026     Data finalització oferta: 29-09-2026


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    GR ENG TELEMÀTICA
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Segon director/a (UPC): SÁNCHEZ VITAL, ROGER
 
Paraules clau:
Wi-Fi, 5G New Radio, Upper 6 GHz band, wireless network auditing, spectral efficiency
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
Wi-Fi consisteix en una tecnologia sense fils que opera en bandes de freqüència sense llicència. En els darrers anys, a les bandes ISM a 2,4 i a 5 GHz, s'ha afegit una part de l'espectre a 6 GHz. Actualment, a Europa, només la part baixa de la banda de 6 GHz es troba disponible per ser utilitzada per la tecnologia Wi-Fi. No obstant, altres països com els Estats Units, amb regulacions menys restrictives, permeten l'ús d'una quantitat més gran d'espectre en aquesta banda de freqüència, fet que comporta un greuge comparatiu en l'amplada de banda disponible per a la connectivitat d'alta velocitat sense subscripció.

Amb la realització d'aquest projecte, l'estudiant realitzarà un ampli estudi de l'estat del desplegament de la tecnologia Wi-Fi, identificant les generacions en funcionament, les prestacions disponibles i les bandes de freqüència utilitzades. Es compararà i analitzarà l'estat del desplegament de Wi-Fi amb el de la tecnologia cel·lular. Per dur a terme aquest estudi, serà necessari realitzar tasques software per: 1) la posada en marxa del testbed de mesura, 2) el postprocessat de les dades capturades.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
This thesis presents an empirical assessment of the deployment status and performance of Wi-Fi and cellular networks across the Barcelona metropolitan area, together with a projection into the Upper 6 GHz band. A multi-phase measurement campaign combined passive Wi-Fi and cellular auditing, Android device telemetry, and targeted cellular modem measurements from a rooted test device. These measurements provided the channel quality indicators required to train a Random Forest model, reconstruct missing cellular values, and calculate theoretical physical layer rates. The resulting datasets were analyzed to evaluate infrastructure density, protocol adoption, frequency and bandwidth allocation, spatial coverage, latency, achievable physical layer rate per spatial stream, and spectral efficiency per spatial stream.

The results show that Wi-Fi 6 and 6E constitute the largest share of detected access points, whereas Wi-Fi 7 remains at an early adoption stage. Although the 2.4 GHz band still represents almost one third of the observed infrastructure, only a small fraction of active clients use it. The 5 GHz band carries most active Wi-Fi traffic, while current 6 GHz deployments remain sparse, discontinuous, and limited to isolated deployment pockets. Cellular measurements show that 5G New Radio connectivity is dominated by the n78 band and consistently outperforms legacy LTE across the evaluated environments. At the single stream level, Wi-Fi and 5G New Radio achieve similar overall physical layer rates, averaging 321.5 and 314.4 megabits per second respectively. Wi-Fi performs best indoors because of short link distances, whereas 5G New Radio achieves its strongest performance outdoors because of higher permitted transmission power.

Finally, the empirical measurements were projected into the Upper 6 GHz band using frequency dependent propagation losses and regulatory power limits. The analysis compared Very Low Power, Low Power Indoor, and Standard Power Wi-Fi profiles with licensed 5G New Radio infrastructure. Standard Power Wi-Fi produced the highest indoor rate, reaching 504.6 megabits per second per spatial stream, while 5G New Radio achieved the highest outdoor rate at 467.2 megabits per second per spatial stream. These findings demonstrate that Wi-Fi offers efficient high capacity indoor access, whereas cellular networks provide stronger outdoor coverage and mobility. Upper 6 GHz allocation, therefore, represents a trade-off between localized unlicensed capacity and wide area licensed connectivity.

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