Efficient Beam Sweeping Paging in Millimeter Wave 5G Networks

In the next generation (5G) new radio (NR) systems, beamforming is an enabling technology for millimeter wave communications which require beam sweeping for transmission. When user equipment (UE) uses discontinuous reception (DRX) to save power, the UE may be informed of incoming services or updating system information through a paging procedure. A next generation NodeB (gNB) transmits the same paging message on multiple beams in discrete time slots to notify the target UE. As the paging is transmitted through beam sweeping, paging transmission occupies multiple time slots and the resources in paging occasion. Additionally, increasing number of time slots make the UE wake up longer to monitor the paging occasion, and this directly increases the power consumption of the UE. In this paper, we propose an efficient beam sweeping paging mechanism taking beam sweeping overhead and UE power consumption into consideration. Mathematical analysis and simulation experiments show that the proposed mechanism enhances the performance of power saving while reducing the overhead of paging sweeping beams.