A Tutorial on Beam Management for 3GPP NR at mmWave Frequencies

By Marco Giordani, Michele Polese, A. Roy, D. Castor, Michele Zorzi. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2018

730 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies offer the availability of huge bandwidths to provide unprecedented data rates to next-generation cellular mobile terminals. However, mmWave links are highly susceptible to rapid channel variations and suffer from severe free-space pathloss and atmospheric absorption. To address these challenges, the base stations and the mobile terminals will use highly directional antennas to achieve sufficient link budget in wide area networks. The consequence is the need for precise alignment of the transmitter and the receiver beams, an operation which may increase the latency of establishing a link, and has important implications for control layer procedures, such as initial access, handover and beam tracking. This tutorial provides an overview of recently proposed measurement techniques for beam and mobility management in mmWave cellular networks, and gives insights into the design of accurate, reactive and robust control schemes suitable for a 3GPP NR (NR) cellular network. We will illustrate that the best strategy depends on the specific environment in which the nodes are deployed, and give guidelines to inform the optimal choice as a function of the system parameters.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3101558ff601e50e57d8b76e62e361159540f19

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

A Tutorial on Environment-Aware Communications via Channel Knowledge Map for 6G (2023, methodology): “As a concrete example, for analog beamforming with MBS = 64 antennas at the BS and MUE = 16 antennas at the UE, it may take seconds to complete the sweeping of all the transmit and receive beams [59], which makes it infeasible for practical use.”
5G Key Technologies for Smart Railways (2020, background): “Another important factor that affects the deployment of mmWave transmissions is beam management, which is composed of beam sweeping, beam measurement, beam determination, and beam reporting [11].”
A Survey on Beyond 5G Network With the Advent of 6G: Architecture and Emerging Technologies (2020, background): “Beamforming is essential for increasing the link budget in the environment of mmWave communication [9].”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, background): “updated the optimal beam pair every 5 ms, consistently with the 3GPP beam management guidelines [158], accounted for the Doppler effect due to the UAV motion, and periodically”
Understanding O-RAN: Architecture, Interfaces, Algorithms, Security, and Research Challenges (2022, methodology): “The combination of C-plane and M-plane can be used to conﬁgure and manage beamforming capabilities of the RU, a key feature in 5G networks, especially at FR2 [112].”
The Integrated Sensing and Communication Revolution for 6G: Vision, Techniques, and Applications (2024, neutral): “For example, initial access to configure the mmWave beams in 5G [270] can be up to 5 s with a simple analog beamforming architecture, with more time expected at sub-THz frequencies [271].”