NR Wide Bandwidth Operations

The 3GPP is in the process of developing the next generation radio access technology, named New Radio (NR), which will be proposed as a candidate technology for IMT-2020. This article outlines the wide bandwidth operation of NR, among other new features being considered, based on the up-to-date discussions and decisions made in 3GPP standardization meetings. The much wider channel bandwidth of NR, compared to LTE, enables more efficient use of resources than the existing carrier aggregation framework with lower control overhead. The support of multiple sub-carrier spacing options allows NR to operate in a wide range of carrier frequency from sub-6 GHz band to mmWave band with appropriate handling of multi-path delay spread and phase noise depending on the carrier frequency. In addition, the introduction of the new bandwidth part concept allows flexible and dynamic configuration of UE's operating bandwidth, which will make NR an energy-efficient solution despite the support of wide bandwidth. Other NR wideband operation related issues, such as the support of UEs with limited RF capability and frequency domain resource indexing, are also explained in this article.