Improving Beam Management Signalling for 5G NR Systems using Hybrid Beamforming

Abstract

5th Generation (5G) millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are enabled through directive and narrow beams that mitigate these frequencies' challenging propagation conditions. In the future, 5G-Advanced and 6G will go even higher in the frequency spectrum, to allow for progressively larger bandwidths. The need for a larger number of narrower beams will put a strain in the current analog beamforming (BF) based beam management (BM) framework. This paper proposes an alternative signalling method for BM to parallelize the beam sweeping procedure using a hybrid analog-digital (HAD) BF architecture to enable mmWave signal multiplexing with a manageable overhead. The proposed solution is shown to significantly enhance beam alignment performance while reducing signalling overhead and latency.