Maria Fresia

5G radio access above 6źGHz

Designing and developing a millimetre-wave mmWave-based mobile radio access technology RAT in the 6-100i¾źGHz frequency range is a fundamental component in the standardisation of the new 5G radio interface, recently kicked off by 3rd Generation Partnership Project. Such component herein called the new mmWave RAT will not only enable extreme mobile broadband services but also support ultra-high definition/three-dimensional streaming, offer immersive applications and ultra-responsive cloud services to provide an outstanding quality of experience to the mobile users. The main objective of this paper is to develop the network architectural elements and functions that will enable tight integration of mmWave technology into the overall 5G radio access network. A broad range of topics addressing mobile architecture and network functionalities will be covered-starting with the architectural facets of network slicing, multi-connectivity and cells clustering, to more functional elements of initial access, mobility, radio resource management and self-backhauling. The intention of the concepts presented here is to lay foundation for future studies towards the first commercial implementation of the mmWave RAT above 6i¾źGHz. Copyright

5G systems: The mmMAGIC project perspective on use cases and challenges between 6–100 GHz

mmMAGIC (Millimetre-Wave Based Mobile Radio Access Network for Fifth Generation Integrated Communications) is an EU funded 5G-PPP project, whose overall objective is to design and pre-develop a mobile radio access technology (RAT) operating in the 6–100 GHz range, capable of impacting standards and other relevant fora. The focus of the project is on extreme Mobile Broadband, which is expected to drive the 5G requirements for massive increase in capacity and data-rates. This paper elaborates on some 5G key research areas such as: identification of the most compelling use-cases and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for future 5G systems, advantages and challenges of millimeter-wave (mmWave) technologies, channel measurements and channel modeling, network architecture; and the design of a new mobile radio interface including multi-node and multi-antenna transceiver architecture.

Joint Beam-Frequency Multiuser Scheduling for Millimeter-Wave Downlink Multiplexing

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is envisioned to be a promising technology to cater for the continuous growth of wireless communication capacity demand. To compensate severe path loss for mmWave signals, mmWave system typically employs beamforming technique to achieve essential antenna gain. To provide services to multiple user equipment (UE), mmWave system needs to schedule UEs in both frequency and beam domain to achieve optimal target utility function. To this end, this paper proposes an efficient joint beam-frequency scheduling algorithm to achieve target scheduling metric while possessing reasonable complexity. As the results of the scheduling algorithm, multiple UEs are optimally multiplexed in both frequency and beam domains in terms of target scheduling metric.

Challenges & solutions for above 6 GHz radio access network integration for future mobile communication systems

Mobile communication technology has been rapidly evolving ever since its first introduction in the late 1980s. The development witnessed is not just in the refinement of the radio access techniques, but also in the progression towards offering sophisticated features and services to the mobile phone users. To fulfill this ever-growing user demand and market trends, frequency ranges in millimeter wave bands are envisioned for wireless radio transmission. To respond to this trends, the EU-funded mmMAGIC project has been launched and its main objective is to design and develop radio access techniques operating in 6 - 100 GHz bands. When it comes to developing technologies for systems operating these frequency ranges, a major challenge encountered will be in terms of its radio access network integration. Unquestionably, issues at various aspects of physical layer design, channel modelling, architecture, network functions and deployment will be encountered; problems in multi-node and multi-antenna transceiver designs will surface as well. The work carried in this project will address those challenges and propose solutions; but additionally, measure its efficiency against the project specific KPIs set to meet the requirements of the operational future 5G systems. The main intention of this paper is to outline some of the challenges, more specifically to highlight the network integration challenges, and discuss some of its technical solutions. The primary purpose here is to focus towards integrated 5G technology, thereby opening further research avenues for the exploration of new and alternate frequency bands in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Heterogeneous beamspace design for 5g millimeter-wave systems

In the last years, the interest on millimeter wave communications increased due to the high potentiality foreseen to face the continuous growth of wireless communications capacity demand. One of the major drawback is represented by the limited coverage capacity. In order to cope with it, beamformers that generate beams with very narrow beams have been studied. Special attention has to be devoted to the tradeoff between coverage distance and area covered by the beam: depending on the UEs deployment, a too narrow beam might result into a low throughput and spectrum efficiency. In this paper a new solution to improve the cell coverage and the spectrum efficiency is proposed. The idea is based on the fact that the beamformers are designed to be flexible to choose the beam from a codebook of beams with different widths and different directions. The choice depends on a scheduling algorithm designed to maximize the performance of the system.