5G NR Coverage, Performance and Beam Management Demonstrated in an Outdoor Urban Environment at 28 GHz

This paper investigates the behaviour of a 28 GHz Massive MIMO 5G new radio (NR) test system operating with 400 MHz bandwidth and one transmission/reception point in a semi-open urban environment. Single-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) performance was evaluated in terms of coverage and propagation. For the considered test area reflections improved the channel conditions. The peak throughput was 6.2 Gbps in line-of-sight corresponding to 15.5 bps/Hz. One transmission/reception point was found to be sufficient to provide good coverage.Furthermore, significant multi-user MIMO gains – often more than 60% for the (median) system downlink throughput – were demonstrated with two users and beam forming with beam tracking in a single cell. This further demonstrates the capacity benefits from beam forming.