5G new radio uplink performance: Noise, interference and emission constraints

This paper investigates the 5G new radio (NR) uplink (UL) performance with CP-OFDM and DFT-s-OFDM based waveforms. The effects of highly non-linear PA behavior, inter-allocation interference, and UL multi-user MIMO on the relative performance of these waveforms are addressed. It is shown that with relaxed EVM and inband emission requirements for CP-OFDM, the coverage limited operation can be improved to achieve better link budget than DFT-s-OFDM based UL without performance penalty in the multi-user uplink. For high-throughput user equipment, the assumed highly non-linear PA behavior restricts the CP-OFDM based transmit power, which may limit the coverage compared to DFT-s-OFDM based waveform in UL without multi-user MIMO support. In UL multi-user MIMO scenario the CP-OFDM based waveform provides clearly better link performance and achieves better link budget than DFT-s-OFDM based waveform. Within the multi-user MIMO UL scenario, the requirement for substantially better PA linearity in high-throughput cases is also observed.