Lean Beam Management for New Radio

Sammanfattning: The use of millimetre-wave frequencies in Fifth generation New Radio has lead to high path loss due to radio propagation environment. Simultaneously, high data rates is a must for current products due to high market demand. This requirement accounts for efficient tracking of the best beam for the user equipment to stay connected to it. Current products at Ericsson use such methods of beam management. These methods call for regular measurements of beams which add up to overhead. Overhead reduction is an area that is being continuously researched. Through this thesis, two algorithms are proposed with the aim to reduce overhead. First, by increasing the periodicity of measurements. Second, by reducing the number of narrow beam measurements. These solutions are simulated by comparing overall system throughput values from a selection of beams. Theoretical calculations have also been done. Both these results are compared to see the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Different use cases are taken into consideration such as stationary and/or mobile users. In review, it can be clearly seen that increasing periodicity of channel sounding is a good way to decrease measurements and use the resources for data instead. However, reducing narrow beam measurements was not found to be an overall feasible algorithm as the system performance was poor for uplink leading to degradation in downlink. Thus, increasing periodicity for channel estimation in downlink can be applied to New Radio beam management scenarios in millimetre-wave high-band to yield better average cell downlink throughput as compared to current products.