5G New Radio UL Coverage with Peak Clipping

For the 5G new radio physical layer the CP-OFDM waveform has been chosen as the baseline for communications below 40 GHz. The requirement for multicarrier waveforms used for uplink is to achieve similar coverage as achieved by SC-FDMA in LTE uplink. In this paper, multiple candidate waveforms with enhanced CP-OFDM processing proposed for 5G incorporating realistic 3GPP compliant power amplifier model and peak clipping are evaluated in uplink transmission, and compared against SC-FDMA in terms of maximum average power amplifier output power and coded block error rate. It is shown that multicarrier waveforms have minor disadvantage in single-PRB transmission, but as the allocation size increases to encounter frequency selective fading the multicarrier waveforms provide similar or even improved link budget compared to SC-FDMA uplink. This implies that given the expected cell edge throughput requirements for 5G mobile broadband services and expected power amplifier development, enhanced CP-OFDM waveforms can achieve the uplink coverage requirement.