Full Coverage with 3GPP technologies On the feasibility of providing full rural cellular coverage

Abstract

The new 3GPP New Radio standard (NR) has been designed with deployment flexibility in mind to enable high-rate mobile broadband services as well as massive and ultra-low latency machine type communications for verticals. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and potential solutions to provide full surface coverage based on main-stream terrestrial cellular 3GPP technology to enable all use-cases. New 3GPP based solutions for improving coverage e.g. using 5G for self-backhauling, resource sharing, and protocol parameters are discussed. The paper includes results on the impact of selected link-budget improvements on cellular coverage under given capacity assumptions. It is shown that long-range systems with enough capacity are feasible with inter-site distances of 65 km with 5G on mid-band (3.5 GHz) notably reducing total cost of ownership.