5G New Radio

5Performance Characteristics of 5G New Radio

Fred Vook

Nokia Bell Labs, USA

5.1 Introduction

As has been the focus in previous chapters, a key component of the New Radio air interface is the flexible and scalable framework for supporting large-scale antenna arrays at the gNB, otherwise called Massive MIMO. The two main reasons for deploying Massive MIMO are for improving system capacity and coverage reliability, both of which are important for providing the high data rates promised by 5G. For bands below 6 GHz, spectrum tends to be in short supply, so improving system capacity in areas of dense user traffic tends to be a key priority. However, the coverage performance improvements of a beam-based air interface can be of great importance for example when covering lightly populated rural areas or when deploying NR at higher carrier frequencies on site grids that were sized for operation at lower carrier frequencies. For bands above 6 GHz, large data rates can be achieved due to the use of large bandwidths, but poor propagation conditions lead to coverage reliability and range being important questions.

In this chapter, we discuss the system level performance benefits of the New Radio air interface with a focus on the MIMO performance characteristics for various antenna array configurations. The discussion is divided into two main sections: the first deals with NR performance in sub-6 GHz bands, and the second deals with NR performance in the mmWave bands. For Sub-6 GHz deployments, ...