Mobility and Coverage Evaluation of New Radio PDCCH for Point-to-Multipoint Scenario

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the mobility and coverage performance of the NR PDCCH in point-to-multipoint scenarios, revealing high mobility support but limited coverage due to pilot granularity issues.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis and simulation-based guidelines on the delay and echo tolerance of NR PDCCH for PTM use cases, especially eMBMS.

Findings

Supports high user mobility with low SNR/CNR requirements

Coverage is limited by pilot frequency domain granularity

System performance varies with channel model and echo conditions

Abstract

This paper provides the mobility and coverage evaluation of New Radio (NR) Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH) for Point-to-Multipoint (PTM) use cases, e.g., eMBMS (evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services). The evaluation methodology is based on analyses and link level simulations where the channel model includes AWGN, TDL-A, TDL-C as well as a modified 0dB echo to model different PTM scenarios. The final version of this work aims to provide insightful guidelines on the delay/echo tolerance of the NR PDCCH in terms of mobility and coverage. In this paper, it is observed that under eMBMS scenario, i.e. SFN channel, due to the time domain granularity of pilots distributed inside the PDCCH region, the system can support very high user movement speed/Doppler with an relatively low requirement on the transmit Signal/Carrier-to-Noise Ratio (SNR/CNR). On the other hand however, the system falls short on its coverage due to the low frequency domain granularity of pilots that effects the channel estimation accuracy.