Rework the Radio Link Budget for 5G and Beyond

Abstract

The 5 th generation of mobile communication system (5G) enables the use of millimeter wave frequency bands and beamforming with narrow-beam directional antennas for mobile communication. Accurate estimation of radio link budget which enables direct assessment of achievable cell range or maximum throughput and facilitates network parametrization before deployment is one of the most challenging problems in radio network planning. In contrast to traditional cellular systems, where omnidirectional or sectoral antennas are deployed with half-power beam-width much larger than angular spread of the radio channel, the beam-width of antenna arrays assumed for 5G in sub-6GHz and millimeter wave bands can be comparable to or smaller than channel angular spread in scattering environment. Since the effective antenna pattern is determined jointly by the nominal antenna pattern and channel angular spread, it is no longer appropriate to use nominal pattern in radio link budget analysis or system level simulations. Simplified approach, where nominal pattern is assumed for all typical propagation conditions, results in overestimation of the signal power in serving links and underestimation of interference, which in consequence gives erroneous estimation of link budget and leads to unsatisfactory network design and deployment. To avoid inaccurate calculation of link budget while maintaining simplicity it is proposed to modify the simplified approach by using effective antenna patterns. On the other hand, effective antenna pattern can be further optimized by matching its half-power beam-width to the angular spread of the radio channel. It is demonstrated via simulations how to rework the radio link budget for accurate estimation of system performance in high bands for 5G and beyond, along with benefits of effective antenna pattern optimization. INDEX TERMS 5G, angular spread, beamforming, directional antenna, effective antenna pattern, millimeter wave, radio link budget.

Optimizing Antenna Arrays for Spatial Multiplexing: Towards 6G Systems

“…Other more general models [77], [78] are widely accepted in wireless community and could be used to further validate the proposed paradigm. On the other hand, their use in massive MIMO applications has been questioned [79], [80], so that we decided to validate the idea simulating an urban scenario by means of ray tracing to estimate antenna performance. To make the analysis even more realistic, the element pattern and polarization of the array, previously neglected, have been taken into account: the antenna array has been modelled as a grid of dual polarized elements This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.…”

Inter-Beam Co-Channel Downlink and Uplink Interference for 5G New Radio in mm-Wave Bands

“…Secondly, in both simulators we considered the same antenna patterns created according to the 3GPP recommendation [ 42 ]. Thirdly, we were able to use a proprietary simulator of the 3GPP statistical model, which was developed in the MATLAB environment and is used for generating the results contributed to the 3GPP, as an input to 5G standardization or research studies (e.g., [ 9 , 44 ]).…”

A Review of Antenna Array Technologies for Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint Wireless Communications at Millimeter-Wave Frequencies

“…Of particular interest are the Close-In (CI) and the Alpha-Beta-Gamma (ABG) models which rely on experimental measurement data [18,19]. An accurate evaluation of the link budget in Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) propagation scenarios for 5Gand-beyond communications is reported, also, in [20,21] based on the 3GPP standard [22]. e main figures of merit that define the performance of an antenna array, as per the illustrations in Figure 2, are used 2…”