Eliane Semaan

Outdoor-to-indoor coverage in high frequency bands

With the continuous growth in connected devices and the need for larger bandwidth channels and greater data speeds, operating at high frequencies can be advantageous for future mobile communications in general, and for 5G-networks in particular. In this paper, the indoor coverage at different high frequencies, namely 10, 30 and 60 GHz has been analyzed in the context of a single building scenario with an outdoor deployed base station and low load conditions. These specific frequencies are only meant as examples to illustrate the general trends of how coverage varies across the frequency range. A main observation, also subject to the assumptions made on propagation, antenna pattern and bandwidth size, is that outdoor to indoor coverage with down link (DL) user throughput higher than 10 Mbps, and in certain cases higher than 100 Mbps, is possible at 10 GHz and above. The case with carrier frequencies up to 30 GHz is more challenging however still manageable, whereas providing outdoor to indoor coverage at 60 GHz may be quite difficult for some building types. It has also been seen that the use of high gain antennas is crucial at high frequencies and that the deployment density depends on the type of building, in other words, on the exterior wall material, interior layout, wall material and building size.

Energy Performance of 5G-NX Wireless Access Utilizing Massive Beamforming and an Ultra-Lean System Design

This paper presents the energy performance of a new radio access technology (RAT) component in 5G, here denoted as 5G-NX. The 5G-NX RAT encompasses massive beamforming and an ultra-lean design as two of its key technology components. The user throughput, resource utilization of the cells and daily average area power consumption are evaluated by means of system level simulations in an Asian city scenario, and the results are compared with a traditional LTE deployment using the same network layout. The simulation results indicate that the new 5G-NX system provides much better energy performance compared to LTE and this is primarily due to the ultra-lean design and the high beamforming gain that provides both longer and more efficient component sleep in the network. At expected traffic levels beyond 2020, 5G-NX is shown to decrease the network energy consumption by more than 50% while providing around 10 times more capacity.

Providing extreme mobile broadband using higher frequency bands, beamforming, and carrier aggregation

To meet future demands on user experience and traffic volumes, mobile networks need to evolve towards providing higher capacities and data rates. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of incorporating higher frequency bands (15 GHz) and beamforming to support this evolution. We see that using user-specific beamforming, the challenging propagation conditions at higher frequencies are mitigated and outdoor-in coverage is often possible. In places where 15 GHz coverage is not satisfactory, swift fallback to a lower frequency band is essential. This is seamlessly provided by carrier aggregation with a 2.6 GHz band. Together these components provide a ten-fold increase in capacity over a reference system operating only at 2.6 GHz.