Physical waveform research for beyond 52.6 GHz in 5G NR networks

Historically, in order to fulfil all the requirements for the new generations, the frequency bands have been expanded from generation to generation. In particular for the fifth generation new radio (5G NR), where the use of millimetre wave (mmWave) frequencies can offer higher bandwidths, communications in frequencies beyond 52.6 GHz seem really promising and are now under discussion in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardisation for the 5G NR future releases. More concretely, both academia and industry are doing research for the frequency range between 52.6 GHz and 114.25 GHz. The reasons why communications beyond 52.6 GHz are interesting is because in those frequencies, high data rate and low latency can be provided due to the large and contiguous channel bandwidth that is available. Also, new use cases can be explored in this frequency range since high accuracy positioning is possible at higher carrier frequencies, such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) radar sensing, that allows new kinds of services. New challenges appear at higher frequencies, or other implementation issues that were not critical in lower frequencies start to become dominant and have to be taken into consideration while defining the new modulations and comparing the possible candidates. The main problems that have to be faced at higher frequencies are the poor propagation conditions (propagation losses are higher than in frequencies below 52.6 GHz), and the radio frequency (RF) impairments that electronic components may have, especially the lower power amplifier (PA) efficiency. Therefore, in order to have a good signal quality, if the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) of the original signal is high, the back-off should be high to make the PA work in the linear region. Thus, the waveform design has to be focused on generating signals with “nearly constant” envelope in order to be able to work closer to the saturation zone of the amplifier without distorting the signal. Also, another problem that has to be taken into account is the large phase noise (PN) present at these frequencies. The main goal of this work is the comparison between different modulations for discrete Fourier transform (DFT) Spread OFDM (DFTs-OFDM) in order to find a suitable candidate that can be part of the 5G NR communications for carrier frequencies beyond 52.6 GHz, and targeting specially low spectral efficiency (between 1 and 2 bps/Hz). Therefore, the main modulation references are pulse shaped π/2- binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) supported in 5G NR Release 15 up link (UL). In this Thesis, several modulation candidates have been tested under realistic conditions by using a 3GPP 5G NR compliant radio link simulator in Matlab. In order to find the best candidate, the waveforms should be able to present good characteristics that can overcome the problems present in mmWave communications. The main contribution of this thesis is to propose a new "constrained" phase shift keying (PSK) modulation, called CPSK, which applies a constraint to the symbols that are transmitted in order to reduce the PAPR of the signal. The results have shown that under the mmWave communications conditions (such as low PA efficiency and high PN), the new CPSK modulations can provide significant improvement with the evaluated PA model when compared to QPSK modulation, and together with extensive link level performance evaluations, a clear link budget gain can also be shown for specific CPSK modulation candidates and pulse shaped π/2-BPSK

Physical waveform research for beyond 52.6 GHz in 5G NR networks

Historically, in order to fulfil all the requirements for the new generations, the frequency bands have been expanded from generation to generation. In particular for the fifth generation new radio (5G NR), where the use of millimetre wave (mmWave) frequencies can offer higher bandwidths, communications in frequencies beyond 52.6 GHz seem really promising and are now under discussion in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardisation for the 5G NR future releases. More concretely, both academia and industry are doing research for the frequency range between 52.6 GHz and 114.25 GHz. The reasons why communications beyond 52.6 GHz are interesting is because in those frequencies, high data rate and low latency can be provided due to the large and contiguous channel bandwidth that is available. Also, new use cases can be explored in this frequency range since high accuracy positioning is possible at higher carrier frequencies, such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) radar sensing, that allows new kinds of services. New challenges appear at higher frequencies, or other implementation issues that were not critical in lower frequencies start to become dominant and have to be taken into consideration while defining the new modulations and comparing the possible candidates. The main problems that have to be faced at higher frequencies are the poor propagation conditions (propagation losses are higher than in frequencies below 52.6 GHz), and the radio frequency (RF) impairments that electronic components may have, especially the lower power amplifier (PA) efficiency. Therefore, in order to have a good signal quality, if the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) of the original signal is high, the back-off should be high to make the PA work in the linear region. Thus, the waveform design has to be focused on generating signals with “nearly constant” envelope in order to be able to work closer to the saturation zone of the amplifier without distorting the signal. Also, another problem that has to be taken into account is the large phase noise (PN) present at these frequencies. The main goal of this work is the comparison between different modulations for discrete Fourier transform (DFT) Spread OFDM (DFTs-OFDM) in order to find a suitable candidate that can be part of the 5G NR communications for carrier frequencies beyond 52.6 GHz, and targeting specially low spectral efficiency (between 1 and 2 bps/Hz). Therefore, the main modulation references are pulse shaped π/2- binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) supported in 5G NR Release 15 up link (UL). In this Thesis, several modulation candidates have been tested under realistic conditions by using a 3GPP 5G NR compliant radio link simulator in Matlab. In order to find the best candidate, the waveforms should be able to present good characteristics that can overcome the problems present in mmWave communications. The main contribution of this thesis is to propose a new "constrained" phase shift keying (PSK) modulation, called CPSK, which applies a constraint to the symbols that are transmitted in order to reduce the PAPR of the signal. The results have shown that under the mmWave communications conditions (such as low PA efficiency and high PN), the new CPSK modulations can provide significant improvement with the evaluated PA model when compared to QPSK modulation, and together with extensive link level performance evaluations, a clear link budget gain can also be shown for specific CPSK modulation candidates and pulse shaped π/2-BPSK

Constrained PSK : Energy-efficient modulation for Sub-THz systems

Deploying sub-THz frequencies for mobile communications is one timely research area, due to the availability of very wide and contiguous chunks of the radio spectrum. However, at such extremely high frequencies, there are large challenges related to, e.g., phase noise, propagation losses as well as to energy-efficiency, since generating and radiating power with reasonable efficiency is known to be far more difficult than at lower frequencies. To address the energy-efficiency and power amplifier (PA) nonlinear distortion related challenges, modulation methods and waveforms with low peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) are needed. To this end, a new modulation approach is formulated and proposed in this paper, referred to as constrained phase-shift keying (CPSK). The CPSK concept builds on the traditional PSK constellations, while additional constraints are applied to the time domain symbol transitions in order to control and reduce the PAPR of the resulting waveform. This new modulation is then compared with pulse-shaped π/2-BPSK and ordinary QPSK, in the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) spread orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) context, in terms of the resulting PAPR distributions and the achievable maximum PA output power, subject to constraints in the passband waveform quality and out-of-band emissions. The obtained results show that the proposed CPSK approach allows for reducing the PAPR and thereon for achieving higher PA output powers, compared to QPSK, while still offering the same spectral efficiency. Overall, the CPSK concept offers a flexible modulation solution with controlled PAPR for the future sub-THz networks.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Phase Noise Resilient Three-Level Continuous-Phase Modulation for DFT-Spread OFDM

In this paper, a novel waveform with low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and high robustness against phase noise (PN) is presented. It follows the discrete Fourier transform spread orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) signal model. This scheme, called 3MSK, is inspired by continuous-phase frequency shift keying (CPFSK), but it uses three frequencies in the baseband model -specifically, 0 and ±fsymbol/4, where fsymbol is the symbol rate -which effectively constrains the phase transitions between consecutive symbols to 0 and ±π/2 rad. Motivated by the phase controlled model of modulation, different degrees of phase continuity can be achieved, allowing to reduce the out-of-band (OOB) emissions of the transmitted signal, while supporting receiver processing with low complexity. Furthermore, the signal characteristics are improved by generating an initial time-domain constant envelope signal at higher than the symbol rate. This helps to reach smooth phase transitions between 3MSK symbols, while the information is encoded in the phase transitions. Also the possibility of using excess bandwidth is investigated by transmitting additional non-zero frequency bins outside the active frequency bins of the basic DFT-s-OFDM model, which provides the capability to greatly reduce the PAPR. The most critical tradeoffs of the oversampled schemes are that improved PAPR is achieved with the cost of somewhat reduced link performance and, in case of excess band, also the spectrum efficiency is reduced. Due to the fact that the information is encoded in the phase transitions, a receiver model that tracks the phase variations without needing reference signals is developed. To this end, it is shown that this new modulation is well-suited for non-coherent receivers, even under strong phase noise (PN) conditions, thus allowing to reduce the overhead of reference signals. Evaluations of this physical-layer modulation and waveform scheme are performed in terms of transmitter metrics such as PAPR, OOB emissions and achievable output power after the power amplifier (PA), using a practical PA model. Finally, coded radio link evaluations are also provided, demonstrating that 3MSK has a similar bit error rate (BER) performance as that of traditional quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), but with significantly lower PAPR, higher achievable output power, and the possibility of using non-coherent receivers.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Enhanced Uplink Coverage for 5G NR : Frequency-Domain Spectral Shaping with Spectral Extension

This paper describes and investigates a novel concept of frequency-domain spectral shaping (FDSS) with spectral extension for the uplink (UL) coverage enhancement in 5G New Radio (NR), building on discrete Fourier transform spread orthogonal frequency-domain multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM). The considered FDSS concept is shown to have large potential for reducing the peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) of the signal, which directly impacts the feasible maximum transmit power under practical nonlinear power amplifiers (PAs) while still meeting the radio frequency (RF) emission requirements imposed by the regulations. To this end, the FDSS scheme with spectral extension is formulated, defining filter windows that fit to the 5G NR spectral flatness requirements. The PAPR reduction capabilities and the corresponding maximum achievable transmit powers are evaluated for a variety of bandwidth allocations in the supported 5G NR frequency ranges 1 and 2 (FR1 and FR2) and compared to those of the currently supported waveforms in 5G NR, particularly π/2-BPSK with FDSS without spectral extension and QPSK without FDSS. Furthermore, an efficient receiver structure capable of reducing the noise enhancement in the equalization phase is proposed. Finally, by evaluating the link-level performance, together with the transmit power gain, the overall coverage enhancement gains of the method are analyzed and provided. The obtained results show that the spectrally-extended FDSS method is a very efficient solution to improve the 5G NR UL coverage clearly outperforming the state-of-the-art, while being also simple in terms of computational complexity such that the method is implementation feasible in practical 5G NR terminals.publishedVersionPeer reviewe