Indoor and outdoor experimental trials in 28-GHz band for 5G wireless communication systems

This paper presents the overview of the experimental trial for the 5th generation (5G) mobile communication systems based on the collaboration between Samsung Electronics and NTT DOCOMO. In order to tackle rapidly increasing traffic for 2020 and beyond, new radio access network for the 5G mobile communication systems will introduce the use of higher-frequency bands such as spectra higher than 10 GHz to achieve higher capacity and super high bit rate transmission of several tens of Gbps. The target of this experimental trial is to evaluate the effectiveness of using 28-GHz band with super-wide bandwidth of 800 MHz for 5G mobile communication systems. Firstly, the technical concept of this trial and the prototype design of the experimental system are presented. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique is attracting attention to compensate for large path-loss in higher frequency bands. In this experimental trial, the beamforming (BF) based on Massive MIMO is introduced to the transmission using 28-GHz band. Some results of the indoor and outdoor experiments are also shown to evaluate the feasibility of using 28-GHz band with 800-MHz bandwidth.