Empirical Performance Evaluation of Enterprise Wi-Fi for IIoT Applications Requiring Mobility

This paper presents empirical latency measurements of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 6 in an industrial setting with focus on handover performance. The basic mechanisms of Wi-Fi handover are evaluated along with improvements from several IEEE 802.11 amendments. Measurements are done for both idle and loaded networks using either dedicated frequency channels or frequency re-use. The benefits of using IEEE 802.11r and optimising scanning parameters are determined. It was found that optimising channel-related scanning parameters significantly reduces latency at the 99.9%-ile, whereas IEEE 802.11r shows improvements to a lesser degree on loaded networks. The observed latency values exceed the typical requirements assumed for IIoT use cases.