Beam Management for 5G NR

5G NR is the first cellular standard that covers carrier frequencies above 6 GHz. Communication over mmWave mobile radio channel faces some challenges: It needs to be considered that the pathloss is proportional to the square of frequency. And due to the short wavelength, mobile radio channel becomes much more vulnerable to slight changes in the environment like motions of the device, reflections or blockage. The effect of higher pathloss for higher frequencies can be overcome by utilizing multiple TX antennas to direct energy and multiple RX antennas can be used to effectively increase aperture size. For that purpose, the task of beam management is to establish and maintain a beam pair consisting of a transmit beam and a receive beam. In this thesis, the 3GPP 5G NR Rel-15 beam management framework shall be explained in detail in a first part. This part shall include explanations how configuration of SSB and CSI-RS can be done in this framework for beam measurement and beam reporting that allows the execution of initial beam establishment and beam adjustment procedures. Moreover, 3GPP 5G NR Rel-15 link recovery mechanisms shall be explained. In a second part, a simulation environment shall be developed that allows investigations on 3GPP 5G NR beam management algorithms. For given system configuration parameters like component carrier bandwidth, subcarrier spacing, RSRP behavior shall be simulated considering specific channel conditions like an indoor office scenario and beam-steering-capable antennas. In a third part, different implementation approaches shall be investigated based on the developed simulation environment for initial beam establishment. Those different implementation approaches shall be compared with respect to their performance.