On Numerology and Capacity of the Self-Contained Frame Structure

The advent of 5G will enable further diverse types of services to be supported, some of which have different requirements from the radio access architecture such as extreme low latency, ultra-high reliability and massive connectivity. With the scarcity of the available bandwidth, careful design of radio frame structures is essential in order to efficiently support the challenging requirements of 5G. The flexible numerology design of the PHY layer frame structure is a key tool in achieving low latency and high reliability. In this paper, we present a methodology to compute the optimal numerology for a given set of requirements from the PHY layer. It is shown that during low mobility and high SNR regimes, the choice of the numerology becomes more critical than at high mobility and low SNR regimes.