Study of Enhancement in 5G Base Station for Reduced Capability New Radio Devices (ARD/299)

In early 5G, three main classes of use cases are primarily developed, i.e., enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) and massive machine type communications (mMTC). Recently, there are some “mid-range” use cases that are in-between these three classes of use cases such as wearables, industrial wireless sensors and video surveillance. 3GPP has defined a new device type called “reduced capability (RedCap)” for such use cases, which aims at lower cost and complexity, smaller physical size, and longer battery life compared to regular 5G new radio (NR) devices. For RedCap devices, although the data rate, latency and reliability requirements are not as demanding as eMBB/URLLC, they are still quite high to achieve. At the same time, RedCap needs to fulfill requirements of long battery life, low cost, and deep coverage. Given the limited device capability, base stations play an important role to help satisfy the requirement of low power consumption and deep coverage. In this seed project, we will study base station enhancement to support RedCap applications. We will also quantify the user equipment (UE) power saving in downlink signaling due to base station algorithms and provide simulation results to evaluate the coverage improvement for both the downlink and uplink with base station enhancement.