Impact of Analog Beamforming on 5G-NR mmWave System Performance

5G-NR (New Radio) specifications have enabled broadband mmWave deployments that can leverage analog beamforming to overcome propagation losses at bands such as 30GHz. We describe how analog beamforming at the BS and at the UE side has significantly impacted the 5G-NR specifications, system design and system performance. We describe the newly introduced set of beam management procedures in 5G-NR that allows such a UE to access the network and maintain connectivity. We observe from simulation results that (in a SU-MIMO system) given a fixed array size, increasing the spatial resolution of the analog beams bring little benefit. However, increasing the array size without increasing the number baseband antenna ports (transceivers) brings significant system gains. We also provide results that show analog beamforming in elevation dimension (3D) is particularly beneficial in dense deployments with above rooftop BS height.