Beamforming is an essential requirement to combat high pathloss and to improve signal-to-noise ratio during initial cell discovery in future millimeter wave cellular networks. The choice of an appropriate beamforming is directly coupled with its energy consumption. The energy consumption is even of more concern at a battery limited mobile station (MS). In this work, we provide an energy consumption based comparison of different beamforming schemes while considering both a low power and a high power analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for a millimeter wave based receiver at the MS. We analyze both context information (CI) (GPS positioning based) and non context information based schemes, and show that analog beamforming with CI (where mobile station’s positioning information is already available) can result in a lower energy consumption, while in all other scenarios digital beamforming has a lower energy consumption than analog and hybrid beamforming. We also show that under certain scenarios recently proposed phase shifters network architecture can result in a lower energy consumption than other beamforming schemes. Moreover, we show that the energy consumption trend among different beamforming schemes is valid irrespective of the number of ADC bits. Finally, we propose a new signaling structure which utilizes a relatively higher frequency sub-carrier for primary synchronization signals compared to other signaling, which allows a further reduction in initial cell search delay and energy consumption of the MS.
The research related to directional cell discovery in mmW 5G cellular networks is very recent. The authors in @cite_7 suggested to scan the complete angular space sequentially to identify the best BF direction both at the MS and the base station (BS). In @cite_12 , directional cell discovery is studied, and the authors showed that DBF with a low-bit ADC at the MS can be preferable compared to the ABF. A delay based comparison for initial access in mmW cellular networks is studied in @cite_2 , where it is shown that DBF has a lower delay than ABF without any performance degradation. In @cite_6 , the advantages of HBF in terms of lower delay and better access probability than ABF are presented for the case of initial beamforming.
@cite_6 @cite_12 @cite_7 @cite_2
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The exploitation of the mm-wave bands is one of the most promising solutions for 5G mobile radio networks. However, the use of mm-wave technologies in cellular networks is not straightforward due to mm-wave severe propagation conditions that limit access availability. In order to overcome this obstacle, hybrid network architectures are being considered where mm-wave small cells can exploit an overlay coverage layer based on legacy technology. The additional mm-wave layer can also take advantage of a functional split between control and user plane, that allows to delegate most of the signaling functions to legacy base stations and to gather context information from users for resource optimization. However, mm-wave technology requires multiple antennas and highly directional transmissions to compensate for high path loss and limited power. Directional transmissions must be also used for the cell discovery and synchronization process, and this can lead to a non negligible delay due to need to scan the cell area with multiple transmissions in different angles. In this paper, we propose to exploit the context information related to user position, provided by the separated control plane, to improve the cell discovery procedure and minimize delay. We investigate the fundamental trade-offs of the cell discovery process with directional antennas and the effects of the context information accuracy on its performance. Numerical results are provided to validate our observations. Cell search is the process for a user to detect its neighboring base stations (BSs) and make a cell selection decision. Due to the importance of beamforming in 5G cellular networks including both the millimeter wave and sub-6 GHz networks, there is a need for a better understanding of the directional cell search delay performance. A cellular network with fixed BS and user locations is considered, so as to take into account the strong temporal correlations that exist for the SINR experienced by each BS and user in this context. For Poisson cellular networks with Rayleigh fading channels, a closed-form expression for the spatially averaged mean cell search delay of all users is derived. This mean cell search delay for a noise-limited network is proved to be infinite whenever the non-line-of-sight path loss exponent is larger than two. For interference-limited networks, a phase transition for the mean cell search delay is shown to exist in terms of the number of BS beams @math : the mean cell search delay is infinite when @math is smaller than a threshold and finite otherwise. Beam-sweeping is also demonstrated to be effective in decreasing the cell search delay, especially for cell edge users. The acute disparity between increasing bandwidth demand and available spectrum has brought millimeter wave (mmWave) bands to the forefront of candidate solutions for the next-generation cellular networks. Highly directional transmissions are essential for cellular communication in these frequencies to compensate for higher isotropic path loss. This reliance on directional beamforming, however, complicates initial cell search since mobiles and base stations must jointly search over a potentially large angular directional space to locate a suitable path to initiate communication. To address this problem, this paper proposes a directional cell discovery procedure where base stations periodically transmit synchronization signals, potentially in time-varying random directions, to scan the angular space. Detectors for these signals are derived based on a Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) under various signal and receiver assumptions. The detectors are then simulated under realistic design parameters and channels based on actual experimental measurements at 28 GHz in New York City. The study reveals two key findings: 1) digital beamforming can significantly outperform analog beamforming even when digital beamforming uses very low quantization to compensate for the additional power requirements and 2) omnidirectional transmissions of the synchronization signals from the base station generally outperform random directional scanning. Initial access is the process which allows a mobile user to first connect to a cellular network. It consists of two main steps: cell search (CS) on the downlink and random access (RA) on the uplink. Millimeter wave (mm-wave) cellular systems typically must rely on directional beamforming (BF) in order to create a viable connection. The BF direction must, therefore, be learned—as well as used—in the initial access process for mm-wave cellular networks. This paper considers four simple but representative initial access protocols that use various combinations of directional BF and omnidirectional transmission and reception at the mobile and the BS, during the CS and RA phases. We provide a system-level analysis of the success probability for CS and RA for each one, as well as of the initial access delay and user-perceived downlink throughput (UPT). For a baseline exhaustive search protocol, we find the optimal BS beamwidth and observe that in terms of initial access delay it is decreasing as blockage becomes more severe, but is relatively constant (about @math ) for UPT. Of the considered protocols, the best tradeoff between initial access delay and UPT is achieved under a fast CS protocol.