An Overview and Mechanism for the Coexistence of 5G NR-U (New Radio Unlicensed) in the Millimeter-Wave Spectrum for Indoor Small Cells

Abstract

In this paper, we first give an overview of the coexistence of cellular with IEEE 802.11 technologies in the unlicensed bands. We then present a coexistence mechanism for Fifth-Generation (5G) New Radio on Unlicensed (NR-U) small cells located within buildings to coexist with the IEEE 802.11ad/ay, also termed as Wireless Gigabit (WiGig). Small cells are dual-band enabled operating in the 60 GHz unlicensed and 28 GHz licensed millimeter-wave (mmW) bands. We develop an interference avoidance scheme in the time domain to avoid cochannel interference (CCI) between in-building NR-U small cells and WiGig access points (APs). We then derive average capacity, spectral efficiency (SE), and energy efficiency (EE) performance metrics of in-building small cells. Extensive system-level numerical and simulation results and analyses are carried out for a number of variants of NR-U, including NR standalone, NR-U standalone, and NR-U anchored. We also analyze the impact of the spatial reuse of both mmW spectra of multiple NR-U anchored operators with a WiGig operator. It is shown that NR-U anchored provides the best average capacity and EE performances, whereas NR-U standalone provides the best SE performance. Moreover, both vertical spatial reuse intrabuilding level and horizontal spatial reuse interbuilding level of mmW spectra in small cells of an NR-U anchored can improve its SE and EE performances. Finally, we show that by choosing appropriate values of vertical and horizontal spatial reuse factors, the proposed coexistence mechanism can achieve the expected SE and EE requirements for the future Sixth-Generation (6G) mobile networks.