SS/PBCH Block Design in 5G New Radio (NR)

5G New Radio (NR) is a new wireless access technology being developed by the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) to meet the diverse performance requirements desired by various use cases. In NR, the combination of synchronization signals (SS) and physical broadcast channel (PBCH) including its demodulation reference signal (DMRS) is referred to as SS/PBCH block (SSB). For a standalone NR system deployed independently from long-term evolution (LTE), SSB is essential for a device to carry out cell search and acquire system information to establish an initial connection, initiate potential handover, or perform beam management. This paper gives an overview of the SSB design in NR and explains in detail the reasons why these concepts were adopted in the standard. Moreover, this paper analyzes different channel estimation methods for PBCH demodulation. Our link level simulation results show that a low PBCH block error rate can be achieved with the joint SS and DMRS based channel estimation for PBCH in NR.