5G NR is a recent air interface developed for 5G. An air interface is the radio frequency portion of the circuit between the mobile device and the active base station.
The 5G New Radio has been developed to provide a significant enhancements in areas like flexibility, scalability and efficiency, both in terms of power usage and spectrum.
5G NR Key Technologies :
- New radio spectrum: There’ll be two frequency ranges FR1 (Sub 6GHz) and FR2 ( mmWave).
- Optimised OFDM: The specific version of OFDM used in 5G NR downlink is cyclic prefix OFDM, CP-OFDM and it is the same waveform LTE has adopted for the downlink signal.
- Beamforming: Beamforming enables the beam from the base station to be directed towards the mobile. In this way the optimum signal can be transmitted to the mobile and received from it, whilst also cutting interference to other mobiles.
- Massive MIMO: A Massive MIMO network will also be more responsive to devices transmitting in higher frequency bands, which will improve coverage. In particular, this will have considerable benefits for obtaining a strong signal indoors.
- Spectrum sharing techniques: Much of the radio spectrum, although allocated, is not used in an efficient manner. One of the techniques being proposed is for spectrum sharing.