Feasibility of Mobile Cellular Communications at Millimeter Wave Frequency

High data rate at high mobile speed will still be an essential requirement for the future 5G mobile cellular system. High frequency bands above 6 GHz are particularly promising for the 5G system because of large signal bandwidths such high frequencies can offer. By using high gain beamforming antennas, the problem of high propagation loss at high frequencies can be overcome. However, the use of beamforming antennas at such high frequencies requires a significant change in the design of a cellular system. In particular, it requires a significant change in key functions such as cell search, random access, measurement of beams for fast beam adaptation, and various physical control and data channels. In this paper, we propose a new radio frame structure for the future mobile cellular communications system at millimeter wave frequency that addresses such challenges. A testbed was built at Samsung Electronics, Korea, based on the proposed frame structure at 28 GHz with bandwidth of 800 MHz. It attained the downlink (DL) data rate of 7.5 Gbps by delivering four streams of 64 QAM data with code rate of 3/4 to two mobile stations (MSs) located in a close distance to the base station antennas at fixed positions. It also achieved the DL data rate of 1.2 Gbps by delivering single stream of 16 QAM data with code rate of 3/4 to an MS moving at 110 km/h in a single cell of up to 800 m in a line-of-sight environment. Finally, it implemented handover and achieved an average handover interruption time of 21 ms in a three-cell environment, and demonstrated feasibility of mobile cellular communications at millimeter wave frequency.