BLER Performance of Carrier Frequency Offset Compensation and Channel Estimation Methods Using Synchronization Signals for NR PBCH

Abstract

This paper proposes estimation methods for carrier frequency offset (CFO) and channel response using synchronization signals for the Physical Broad-cast Channel (PBCH) of the 3GPP New Radio (NR) specifications. In the proposed methods, we estimate and compensate the CFO of the received PBCH by employing the primary synchronization signal (PSS) followed by estimation of the channel response using the demodulation reference signal (DMRS) and the secondary synchronization signal (SSS). Simulation results show that the proposed CFO estimation method achieves almost the identical average block error rate (BLER) for the PBCH as that without CFO. We also show that the channel estimation method using the DMRS and SSS decreases the required average received SNR at the average BLER of $10^{-3}$ by approximately 0.4 dB compared to that with only the DMRS. Finally, we show the effect of successive cancellation (SC) decoding and cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding on the BLER of the PBCH with a low polar coding rate.