Air Interface Design and Ray Tracing Study for 5G Millimeter Wave Communications

To meet the explosive growth in traffic during the next twenty years, 5G systems using local area networks need to be developed. These systems will comprise of small cells and will use extreme cell densification. The use of millimeter wave (Mmwave) frequencies, in particular from 20 GHz to 90 GHz, will revolutionize wireless communications given the extreme amount of available bandwidth. However, the different propagation conditions and hardware constraints of Mmwave (e.g., the use of RF beamforming with very large arrays) require reconsidering the modulation methods for Mmwave compared to those used below 6 GHz. In this paper we present ray-tracing results, which, along with recent propagation measurements at Mmwave, all point to the fact that Mmwave frequencies are very appropriate for next generation, 5G, local area wireless communication systems. Next, we propose null cyclic prefix single carrier as the best candidate for Mmwave communications. Finally, system-level simulation results show that with the right access point deployment peak rates of over 15 Gbps are possible at Mmwave along with a cell edge experience in excess of 400 Mbps.