Performance Characteristics of 5G New Radio

A key component of the New Radio (NR) air interface is the flexible and scalable framework for supporting large‐scale antenna arrays at the gNB, otherwise called Massive MIMO. This chapter discusses the system level performance benefits of the NR air interface with a focus on the MIMO performance characteristics for various antenna array configurations. The discussion is divided into two main sections: the first deals with NR performance in sub‐6 GHz bands, and the second deals with NR performance in the mmWave bands. For Sub‐6 GHz deployments, the focus is on the downlink, where the chapter shows how the system performance improves as the array size increases and how the system performance is impacted by inter‐site distance. For deployments in the mmWave bands, the chapter shows what data rates and cell radius can expected to be supported in the mmWave bands.