Blind Numerology Identification for Mixed Numerologies

5G New Radio (NR) introduces new flexibility that different numerologies can be selected to meet the requirements of a wide variety of services. For this new structure, blind numerology identification can increase system efficiency. Therefore, we propose a blind identification method for mixed numerologies. An autocorrelation method is applied in the time domain by correlating the cyclic prefix (CP) signal of the candidate numerology in the received composite signal for numerology type identification. Then, the location of each numerology in the frequency domain is identified by the variance difference in the power spectral density (PSD) of the subbands, on which different numerologies are occupied. The simulation results are obtained under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and frequency-selective channels. The obtained results show that the proposed method has a robust identification accuracy and a satisfactory BER performance as compared to the non-blind identification approach in the conventional mixed-numerology system.