NR Wide Bandwidth Operations

TL;DR

This paper discusses the wide bandwidth operation of 5G New Radio (NR), highlighting its flexible, efficient, and scalable features across various frequency bands, and its implications for future wireless communication standards.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of NR's wide bandwidth capabilities, including new concepts like bandwidth parts and multi-band support, advancing 5G standardization.

Findings

NR supports wider channel bandwidths than LTE, enabling more efficient resource use.

Introduction of bandwidth parts allows flexible and energy-efficient UE operation.

NR can operate across sub-6 GHz and mmWave bands with appropriate handling.

Abstract

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is in the process of developing the next generation radio access technology, named New Radio (NR), which will be proposed as a candidate technology for IMT-2020. This article outlines the wide bandwidth operation of NR, among other new features being considered, based on the up-to-date discussions and decisions made in 3GPP standardization meetings. The much wider channel bandwidth of NR, compared to LTE, enables more efficient use of resources than the existing carrier aggregation framework at lower control overhead. The support of multiple sub-carrier spacing options allows NR to operate in a wide range of carrier frequency from sub-6 GHz band to mmWave band with appropriate handling of multi-path delay spread and phase noise depending on the carrier frequency. In addition, the introduction of the new bandwidth part concept allows to flexibly and dynamically configure User Equipment's (UE's) operating bandwidth, which will make NR an energy efficient solution despite the support of wide bandwidth. Other NR wideband operation related issues, such as the support of UEs with limited radio frequency (RF) capability and frequency domain resource indexing, are also explained in this article.