5G Cellular User Equipment: From Theory to Practical Hardware Design

Abstract

Research and development on the next generation wireless systems, namely 5G, has experienced explosive growth in recent years. In the physical layer (PHY), the massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technique and the use of high GHz frequency bands are two promising trends for adoption. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands such as 28 GHz, 38 GHz, 64 GHz, and 71 GHz, which were previously considered not suitable for commercial cellular networks, will play an important role in 5G. Currently, most 5G research deals with the algorithms and implementations of modulation and coding schemes, new spatial signal processing technologies, new spectrum opportunities, channel modeling, 5G proof of concept (PoC) systems, and other system-level enabling technologies. In this paper, we first investigate the contemporary wireless user equipment (UE) hardware design, and unveil the critical 5G UE hardware design constraints on circuits and systems. On top of the said investigation and design trade-off analysis, a new, highly reconfigurable system architecture for 5G cellular user equipment, namely distributed phased arrays based MIMO (DPA-MIMO) is proposed. Finally, the link budget calculation and data throughput numerical results are presented for the evaluation of the proposed architecture.Comment: Submitted to IEEE ACCESS. It has 18 pages, 17 figures, and 5 table

Multi-Beam Multi-Stream Communications for 5G and beyond Mobile User Equipment and UAV Proof of Concept Designs

“…As illustrated in Fig. 1, the distributed phased arrays architecture proposed in [6] can mitigate several major technical challenges for future 5G hardware engineering particularly at the UE end, such as human blockage, self-heating issues, coexistence and interference cancellation (of different wireless standards) requirement. Moreover, such DPA architecture enables other advanced features, e.g., high spatial multiplexing gain, slim form factor, high reconfigurability and design freedom.…”

“…The fifth generation (5G) global deployment has been accelerated by joint efforts from both academia and industry, with millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication, massive MIMO and beamforming techniques becoming immediate reality. In particular, various promising 5G hardware components, circuits and systems have been proposed and demonstrated, from system level to device level [1]- [6]. On the other hand, recent years have also witnessed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)/drone technologies advancing significantly, which has made them more affordable and accessible to civilian and commercial applications [7]- [10].…”

Analysis of Intelligent Vehicular Relaying in Urban 5G+ Millimeter-Wave Cellular Deployments

“…Following the 3GPP considerations, the heights of APs and UEs are set to 10 m and 1.5 m, respectively [9]. The UE transmit power is 23 dBm and the antenna gains are given as G A = 27 dB and G U = 15 dB [17]. The radius of a human body is set to 0.3 m, while its height is 1.75 m. We assume 5% of large vehicles, i.e., p T = 0.05 [18].…”

Multi-Sector and Multi-Panel Performance in 5G mmWave Cellular Networks

“…However, even if the use of 3 panels at the UE node results in an improvement of the performance, from a practical implementation point of view, the design of a UE with these many panels must be studied carefully, since it may not be easy to physically place all the panels in the handset. Some preliminary designs and considerations are given in [20], [21].…”