5G New Radio Base-Station Sensitivity and Performance

In this paper, we address and analyze the receiver reference sensitivity requirements for the 5G New Radio (NR) wireless communications systems, which relate to the SNR requirements at the base station to reach 95 % of the maximum throughput defined for fixed reference channels. Based on the latest 3GPP specifications and evaluation assumptions agreed for Release 15, a wide set of different transmission bandwidths and radio interface numerologies are investigated, at sub-6GHz and millimeter-wave frequency ranges, covering both AWGN and fading channel scenarios as well as varying mobility conditions. The performance results in terms of the relative throughput and block error rate using LDPC coding scheme are presented and analyzed, while for comparison purposes also LTE turbo code based results are provided. The results show that in frequency-selective channels, the reference sensitivity and UL radio link performance are systematically better with LDPC code compared to turbo code. The results also indicate that the purely front-loaded demodulation reference signal (DM-RS) based system can outperform the corresponding two DM-RS based system even at higher velocities and high center frequencies, allowing low decoding latency and efficient pipelined receiver processing.