Coverage Evaluation for 5G Reduced Capability New Radio (NR-RedCap)

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the coverage performance of 5G NR-RedCap devices across various scenarios and frequencies, identifying potential coverage limitations and suggesting that minimal recovery is needed for most use cases.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive coverage analysis of 5G NR-RedCap devices across multiple scenarios and frequencies, highlighting channels that may limit coverage and solutions to mitigate this.

Findings

Coverage recovery needed is less than 1 dB in all scenarios.

Smaller data rate targets can compensate for coverage limitations.

Coverage performance varies with frequency and environment.

Abstract

The fifth generation (5G) wireless technology is primarily designed to address a wide range of use cases categorized into the enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC), and massive machine-type communication (mMTC). Nevertheless, there are a few other use cases which are in-between these main use cases such as industrial wireless sensor networks, video surveillance, or wearables. In order to efficiently serve such use cases, in Release 17, the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) introduced the reduced capability NR devices (NR-RedCap) with lower cost and complexity, smaller form factor and longer battery life compared to regular NR devices. However, one key potential consequence of device cost and complexity reduction is the coverage loss. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of NR RedCap coverage for different physical channels and initial access messages to identify the channels/messages that are potentially coverage limiting for RedCap UEs. We perform the coverage evaluations for RedCap UEs operating in three different scenarios, namely Rural, Urban and Indoor with carrier frequencies 700 MHz, 2.6 GHz and 28 GHz, respectively. Our results confirm that for all the considered scenarios, the amounts of required coverage recovery for RedCap channels are either less than 1 dB or can be compensated by considering smaller data rate targets for RedCap use cases.