Modular and High-Resolution Channel State Information and Beam Management for 5G New Radio

Abstract

This article provides an overview of key features pertaining to CSI reporting and beam management for the 5G New Radio (NR) currently being standardized in 3GPP. For CSI reporting, the modular design framework and high-resolution spatial information feedback offer not only flexibility in a host of use cases and deployment scenarios, but also improved average user throughput over state-of-the-art 4G LTE. To accommodate cellular communications in the milimeter-wave regime where a combination of analog and digital beamforming is typically used at both a base station and user equipment, beam management procedures such as measurement, reporting, and recovery are introduced. The utility and joint usage of these two features are demonstrated along with some potential upgrades for the next phase of 5G NR.