A Scheme for improving 5G Cell Search Performance

Abstract

PBCH demodulation is one of the important steps in 5G cell search. PBCH DMRS is specifically designed to provide channel information for PBCH demodulation. Because SSS is adjacent to DMRS and has the same EPRE as DMRS, SSS can be used for PBCH channel estimation with DMRS to improve the accuracy of channel estimation. Although PSS is also adjacent to DMRS, it can not be used for PBCH channel estimation due to the unknown EPRE ratio of PSS to DMRS. This paper proposes a scheme to estimate the EPRE ratio of PSS to SSS/DMRS. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can estimate the EPRE ratio accurately when SNR is above −4dB and joint channel estimation with PSS, SSS and DMRS can improve the success probability of cell search greatly compared to channel estimation with DMRS only.