Overcoming 5G PRACH Capacity Shortfall: Supersets of Zadoff–Chu Sequences With Low-Correlation Zone

5G physical random access channel (PRACH) will use new preamble formats based on short Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences to enable new use cases. These formats result however in a PRACH capacity shortfall where the number of sequences available for network planning may just be enough to support few cells without sequence reuse. To overcome this issue, two enlarged constant-amplitude sequence constructions that include ZC sequences, and thus being backward-compatible with the current 5G PRACH design, are presented. Both constructions feature a desirable subset structure from which follows a natural cellular network sequence allocation where each cell-specific sequence subset has a controllable low-correlation zone similar to ZC sequences, and thus enables a similar detection performance inside a cell. The two extensions are meanwhile structurally different and offer different network allocations, as for one, new sequences are distributed among all cells, while for the other, they are in separated cells. With both proposed supersets and the new 5G PRACH formats, hundred-times more cells without sequence reuse can be supported compared to ZC sequences for a moderately larger inter-cell correlation than intra-cell correlation. Simulation results confirm that using the proposed supersets instead of reusing sequences in the network can significantly improve detection performance.