General physical layer procedures
In this section, we are going to analyze the structure of the 5G air interface and related physical layer procedures. We will explain the following:
- NR’s general physical layer structure
- Improved spectral efficiency
- Channel structure of the radio interface and how it relates to LTE
- The NR cell concept and how it relates to LTE
The NR physical layer at a glance
In NR, in general, adaptive Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) are used. We will go into detail about them later when we discuss downlink and uplink transmissions, which are Cyclic Prefix – Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CP-OFDM) and Discrete Fourier Transform-spread-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) respectively.
OFDMA, in general, helps channel-dependent scheduling and link adaptation in time and frequency domains. In contrast to LTE, we...
